


Move Fast And Break Things

by ozymandias314



Series: Toni Stark [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Author is gratuitously self-indulgent, Disabled Character, F/M, Genderswap, NaNoWriMo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2016-08-18
Packaged: 2018-04-29 16:26:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 50,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5134619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozymandias314/pseuds/ozymandias314
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Dr. Stark, I have had quite a lot of time to think about how to break this to you,” the man said, “and to be honest I haven’t figured out anything better than honesty. During the demonstration of your latest products, you were kidnapped by the Ten Rings terrorist organization; in the process, they hit you with various bits of shrapnel. I saved your life, but it shattered your spine and is lodged dangerously near your heart, giving you perhaps two weeks to live.” </p><p>Toni considered this. </p><p>“So what you’re saying,” Toni said, “is that the bad news is that I’m crippled, and the good news is that I’m not going to have to be crippled for very long.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> See the end notes for the most recent content warnings.

When Toni Stark woke up, her first thought was that she really needed to drink less. Not knowing where or, indeed, when you woke up was all very well in your twenties, but she had just turned forty, and that wasn’t really a good look on her. Her second thought was that this was an extraordinarily unusual place to wake up, even by her standards. For one thing, it seemed to be either a cave, or a cave-themed hotel room with an unusual commitment to realism with regards to moss. For another, there seemed to be quite a lot of guns strewn around.

Her third thought was that while she was prone to having blackouts she at least usually remembered starting drinking, and her last memory was having a bunch of Stark Industries’s latest exploding behind her like so many fireworks, which was (Toni was unashamed to admit) pretty fucking badass.

Her fourth thought, and indeed her fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth thoughts, were that she couldn’t feel her legs.

“You’re awake,” said a man. “Good.” He had a bald head, a neatly trimmed beard, and the general air of being an Oxford professor about to comment on a fine point of Seneca, which was somewhat incongruous given the AK-47 he was sitting next to.

Toni would have normally answered that with a witticism. However, given the circumstances, Toni felt that her lack of creativity would be forgiven. “What the fuck happened to my fucking legs?”

“Dr. Stark, I have had quite a lot of time to think about how to break this to you,” the man said, “and to be honest I haven’t figured out anything better than honesty. During the demonstration of your latest products, you were kidnapped by the Ten Rings terrorist organization; in the process, they hit you with various bits of shrapnel. I saved your life, but it shattered your spine and is lodged dangerously near your heart, giving you perhaps two weeks to live.”

Toni considered this.

“So what you’re saying,” Toni said, “is that the bad news is that I’m crippled, and the good news is that I’m not going to have to be crippled for very long.”

The man inclined his head, as if to say “you said it, not me.”

“They don’t really spend a lot of time on bedside manner in terrorist med school, do they?”

“You’re joking, that’s good,” the man said. “You’ll need all your faculties when they return.”

Toni wanted to swing off the bed, to pace back and forth while she processed this. (That wasn’t true. What she wanted was to lock herself in her workshop back in New York, working until she collapsed from exhaustion on the floor, and only emerge when she’d made at least two discoveries that would revolutionize physics. But pacing was better than nothing.) But she couldn’t (and, she thought in a quick flash as quickly repressed, she would never be able to do so again). So instead Toni closed her eyes.

If she had just found out that she was kidnapped by the Ten Rings, or just found out that she would be crippled for the rest of her life, or just found out that she had two weeks to live, then Toni would have made a scene. For that matter, if there had been thirty minutes between each of those discoveries, Toni felt, she probably could have made a decent effort. But finding out three life-ruining facts, in the space of a sentence, left her with only a sense of calm, a grim determination.

It occurred to her briefly that the man might be lying. It certainly seemed like this was the sort of cave terrorists would hide out in-- but then (Toni thought) her previous experience was action movies and weapons demonstrations, hardly making her an expert. But on the other hand she was clearly kidnapped, and she clearly could not walk, and that was enough to go on. She could figure out whether he was lying about everything else later.

Toni had read about the five stages of grief, and she thought they were bullshit. There wasn’t much point to Denial-- either a thing was true or it wasn’t-- and Toni had never been a big fan of Bargaining. She didn’t suck up to people, instead preferring to sufficiently awesome that they had to suck up to her.

Instead, Toni practiced the Toni Stark Stages of Grief, which were as follows:

  1. Five seconds of regret.
  2. Jokes
  3. Drinking.
  4. Trying To Get JARVIS And/Or Pepper And/Or Obie To Fix The Thing.
  5. Engineering.



Drinking was probably not possible-- she’d vaguely heard that Muslims weren’t big fans of alcohol, and anyway Toni could hear the voice of Pepper inside her head saying “I can cover for you at the Stark Foundation gala. I can cover for you at shareholder meetings. But being kidnapped by terrorists is not something you can do wasted!” And both JARVIS and Obie were half a world away.

But, fortunately, no matter what happened, she still had Jokes. So she shoved away her grief into the tiny locked corner of her mind where there lived thoughts like “my father was never proud of me” and “I miss my parents” and “when I die, the only people who are going to care are those who are paid to do so”, and opened her eyes.

“I’m Dr. Yinsen,” the man said.

“Toni.”

“I know, Dr. Stark,” he said. “I’m a big fan of your work. I wish I could have made your acquaintance under more favorable circumstances.”

“I have terrorist fans now?” Toni said. “You really appreciate the construction of the missiles I blow you to smithereens with?”

Snark aside, Toni had to admit that, all things considered, this was a fairly likeable kidnapper. At least he remembered her doctorate. There was many a society lady in New York City you couldn’t say as much about.

“Unfortunately,” Yinsen said, “I am as much a captive as you are.”

“That sounds like exactly what the good cop says before pressing me for information about confidential Stark Industries tech,” Toni said. “Well, not cop. Terrorist? Is there such a thing as a good terrorist? Man, I’d say that would get me on a watchlist, but given that I’m already inside a terrorist cave that seems to be a little bit late--”

What Yinsen was about to say in response was lost to history, as Toni suddenly heard voices-- presumably from another room that she wasn’t in a position to see. While Toni didn’t understand their language, the tone was unmistakable to anyone who’d spent five minutes around a soldier: being tired after a long day’s work; the desire for a warm fire and a warm bed.

“They’re here,” Yinsen said unnecessarily.

A man dressed in camo entered the room. He glanced at Toni, obviously awake and alive, and his eyes widened. He exchanged a handful of sharp words with Yinsen, who did seem to understand the language, then rushed away.

“He’s getting Raza,” Yinsen said.

“Who the fuck is Ra--” Toni began, before she was cut off by having a piece of paper shoved unceremoniously in front of her face.

Toni had only been disabled for five minutes, but she was already beginning to hate it.

“Look, I would love to help,” Toni said. “But I can’t actually read that.”

“What?” Yinsen said. “It’s in English.”

Toni squinted. It seemed plausible. There were lots of straight-up-and-down lines. Arabic probably involved more curves. “Doesn’t help much. If you give me two hours and some Tylenol I can probably get the gist of it.”

“You can’t read,” Yinsen said.

“Severe dyslexia,” Toni said. “About the worst my doctor had ever seen. ...Look, you’re a fan of my work, didn’t you ever wonder why I only program in HoLISP? Why I wrote JARVIS?”

“...You invented a hologram-based programming language and an artificial intelligence because it was easier than learning to read?”

“Technically,” Toni said, “technically, the programming language was my dad.”

Yinsen was interrupted by a flurry of words from the lead terrorist. Yinsen responded briefly. The terrorist stormed off. The quiet murmur of voices in the other room became much louder.

“Raza is yelling at his men for kidnapping a retard,” Yinsen said. “Um, no offense.”

“No worries, I get from my competitors all the time,” Toni said. “Usually about an hour before I bankrupt their company. Raza is the guy who looks like two caterpillars died on his face?”

“The very same,” Yinsen said. “Now one of his men is accusing you of faking.”

Boots stomping on the floor; Caterpillar Eyebrow Guy entered the room again and shouted at Toni. Yinsen translated, “he doesn’t care what is wrong with you. You know how to build weapons. He has lost many of his best people to Stark weapons, and wants them himself. He will give you all the parts he can find, and you will build them for him. You will begin with a Jericho missile.”

“Um, why?” Toni said. “I’m going to die in two weeks. I’m not going to spend my last two weeks building weapons for terrorists.”

Yinsen and Caterpillar Eyebrows briefly exchanged words. Yinsen said, “Well, at the moment you get to be alive for two weeks, and if he shoots a bullet between your eyes, you’re going to die right now.”

“Persuasive argument,” Toni said.

Yinsen translated that-- it seemed to take much longer in his version and be significantly more apologetic-- and, apparently satisfied, Caterpillar Eyebrows snapped out a last order and left.

“He wants me to move you to my house,” Yinsen said. “He is afraid that, since you’re pretending not to know how to read, you may also be pretending to not know Arabic. They will move camp immediately.”

“I have to say, this is a refreshing change,” Toni said. “Usually people underestimate me. So, uh, how is this going to work? Does Afghanistan have wheelchairs?”

\--

Afghanistan did not have wheelchairs.

Toni had to hand it to the Ten Rings. She was pretty sure she would be nowhere near this professional about carrying a representative of the Great Satan piggyback when all you wanted to do was crawl into your nice warm bed and dream of 72 virgins. But the man Toni had started to think of as “her terrorist” stared straight ahead with a dignified expression on his face, walked smoothly and without bouncing her around, and was careful to make sure her hold was secure. While she had not been kidnapped before, she still felt like this was above-average kidnapping service. 10/10, Would Not Want To Be Kidnapped Again, But Am Less Upset About It Than I Would Be Otherwise.

Yinsen jogged alongside her. In spite of the setting, the company, and the enormous toolbox he was carrying, he somehow managed to look like an academic going on his daily constitutional.

“So what’s your story?” Toni asked. “You’re not a terrorist, who are you?”

“Surgeon,” he said. “Studied at Cambridge. Made a mistake of taking my family to visit my hometown in Afghanistan while the Ten Rings were looking for a doctor.”

“Damn,” Toni said. “I could have sworn you were from Oxford. --Wait. Ho Yinsen?”

“Yes,” the man said.

“The Ho Yinsen?” Toni said. “Pioneer in robosurgery?”

“The very same.”

“Jesus Christ.” Toni shook her head. “Everyone thought you were dead.”

“Unfortunately not the case,” Yinsen said.

“I’m sorry I called you a terrorist,” Toni said. “Of any sort. Good or bad.”

“It was an understandable mistake,” Yinsen said. “I, too, would no doubt call people terrorists after I had been kidnapped-- although I didn’t have any non-terrorists around to test it on at the time.”

“I wish I could get JARVIS to meet you,” Toni said. “You’re the whole reason he can touch things, you know that? --Oh, god, you were kidnapped four years ago, you have no idea the strides we’ve made.”

“I look forward to picking your brains over the next two weeks,” Yinsen said. “Mountains are not known for their easy access to academic journals.”

Toni’s mind raced, trying to figure out what to say first. They had only two weeks, and she had to tell him everything! She could probably think about it while she was knocking out the first two Jericho missiles-- wait. Why was she assuming that she would build Raza missiles? Toni’s opinion of the Ten Rings was hardly positive to begin with, and being kidnapped had somewhat soured her disposition. Besides, they called her a retard. No one got away with calling her a retard.

Well, Raza could kill her. And if she were dead it would be a bit difficult to tell Yinsen about robotics. But if there was one thing Toni had learned over the years, it was that you should never assume there was only one kind of machine you could build to solve a problem.

“How is he planning to tell if I’m building a Jericho missile?” Toni asked. “I mean, I can build him an arsenal in two weeks, but it’s easy enough to incorporate subtle flaws into the machinery that he won’t see until after I’m safely dead.”

“That operation did not go remotely as Raza had hoped,” Yinsen said. “He didn’t want you dead, he wanted you a prisoner. This is him trying to make the best of this enormous mess. If you had woken up a week earlier, you would have gotten to see the corpses of the people who failed him.” His mouth was flat. “Speaking as a medical man, it was somewhat gruesome.”

Toni revised up her estimate of the terrorist’s professionalism. If she had to carry around someone who was indirectly responsible for the death of one of her comrades, she would definitely have accidentally hit them against a rock.

“Lucky for Raza,” Toni said, “I’m not actually going to die.”

She hadn’t thought the sentence until she said it, but once she did, it was obviously true. This was not how Toni Stark dies.

“You’re going to stop the shrapnel from entering your heart?” Yinsen said. “How?”

“Not sure yet,” Toni said. “But bodies are just machines made of meat. It’s an engineering problem. And there’s no such thing as something I can’t build.”

Toni had to admit it, she was excited. Admittedly, she wouldn’t have chosen to be kidnapped, or crippled, or only have two weeks to live. But for far too long, her life had been, well, somewhat routine. Revolutionize an industry. Build something that blows up and kills people. Build something that blows up bigger and kills more people. Get drunk. Fuck a male model. Fight with Pepper or Obie. Order Chinese. Ignore a tabloid blaring “ATTENTION-STARVED TONI STARK HITS BOTTOM”. Revolutionize another industry. It got boring.

But this… this was a real problem, with real stakes. Something that affected more than Stark Industries’s stock prices. If she didn’t fix it, people would die-- as opposed to the normal state of affairs, where people would die if she did.

Now that was something to wake up in the morning for. She could barely wait to get started.

“What’s he going to do with me if I don’t die?” Toni asked.

“You’d be like me. A prisoner,” Yinsen said. “I’ve stitched together the Ten Rings for four years.”

“You didn’t escape?”

Yinsen shrugged. “I tried once.”

“How’d that go?”

“I have three children.”

“I… don’t see how that’s related.”

“I used to have four.”

“Oh.”

Yinsen had gotten an A in his stiff upper lip classes at Cambridge. “He does not wish to kill me. I have useful skills. We are both lucky to be in such a position. His other soldiers have no such protection.”

On one hand, Toni was in a much better position than Yinsen to make an escape attempt. She had no children, except of the silicon variety, and those were a bit difficult to shoot in the head. He could torture her, perhaps, but he couldn’t cause that much damage; he wanted her brain and her hands preserved. She briefly wondered how Raza would have kept her from escaping if she hadn’t been crippled (armed guard?), but right now it looked like he was going to trust to the fact that she couldn’t walk unaided and was stuck between a bunch of mountains and a desert.

On the other hand, nothing was stopping Raza from killing more of Yinsen’s children if Toni escaped. And Toni liked Yinsen. JARVIS would be sad if he never got to meet him. And Yinsen remembered her doctorate.

There was nothing else for it. She would, of course, escape; she would escape the first time she tried it; and she would bring Yinsen and his family with her; and hopefully she would cause the deaths of Raza and his men, if for no other reason than that her terrorist deserved the most peaceful death the Geneva Conventions could give him.

It was nice to know the outline of the problem.

When they arrived at the villages, Toni immediately had vivid fantasies of real estate development. The houses were rectangular, with flat roofs and square glassless windows cut into the walls, and were made of clay; they looked as if the villagers had invented the concept of mud in 3000 BC and, satisfied, taken the next five thousand years off. It was personally offensive to Toni as an engineer.

Step five, she thought: found Architects Without Borders.

As they approached, Toni heard upset voices. She braced herself; angry terrorists did not seem very conductive to any part of her new plan. But neither Yinsen nor; and when they turned the corner to see the people, they weren’t dressed in camo and none of them had guns. In fact, one of them looked somewhat like Toni’s grandma. Toni wasn’t exactly an antiterrorism expert, but she was pretty sure terrorists didn’t come in grandma.

“What’s wrong?” Toni asked.

“One of the family’s cell phones got water on it,” Yinsen said. “They’re herders; texting each other allows them to keep track of the animals. They can’t afford a new one, and without enough cell phones the family will go hungry.”

Toni felt a sudden rush of homesickness. A cell phone. The first piece of technology she’d seen since she got in this godforsaken country that wasn’t specifically designed for killing people. If it was a StarkPhone, she would hug them. Ugh, who was she kidding, she would hug them even if it turned out to be a fucking HammerPhone.

But none of those feelings showed in the cocky grin on her face. “Oh, that’s all?” Toni said. “I can fix that.”


	2. Chapter 2

Thus began what Toni would look back on as the happiest period of her life.

Toni’s mind needed something to chew on. If she had a problem, it chewed on the problem. If she didn’t, it chewed on itself. And Afghanistan, Toni had quickly found, was a place that consisted of approximately 90% problem. 

It turned out the people of this village and environs didn’t just have broken cell phones. They had broken cars, motorcycles, radios, an air conditioner. Toni traveled on the back of Yinsen’s teenage son to inspect a well; she acquired an impressive understanding of methods for improving agricultural tools. If the terrorists noticed that her requests were perhaps less useful for building Jericho missiles and more useful for busted carburetors, they didn’t say anything. 

She would have said “it was perfect, except that there wasn’t any whiskey.” But to be honest when she woke up sprawled across her workbench, a circuit board imprinted on her cheek, she didn’t even want a drink.

Much. After all, she was only human. 

“They call you the magic woman, you know,” Yinsen said.

“If only my press was that good back home,” Toni said, bent over her workbench. 

Being disabled was less bad than she’d expected. On one hand, she couldn’t get out of her chair. On the other hand, as long as people kept bringing her things to fix, she didn’t have much reason to get out of her chair. The worst part was when she pushed aside a project without thinking about it and then couldn’t reach it to grab it when she needed it. Fortunately, shouting “YINSEN!” usually got her what she wanted in short order. 

“They’ve started to go to the city dumps to find broken things to bring to you,” Yinsen said. 

“There’s a city?” Toni asked.

“Not within four days’ ride.”

“Optimistic, aren’t they?” Toni asked. “How do they know I’ll still be here in four days?”

“Well, for one thing,” Yinsen said, “I’ve been here for more than four years.”

Toni briefly imagined what it would be like to live here forever, to have an exciting new problem every few hours, to constantly have to improvise when she lacked that tool or this component instead of having a workbench full of everything she could ever need, to have people be grateful to her instead of calling her a drunken slut and sending people to take pictures of her in her undies--

To have to build missiles for a terrorist. 

Well, there were downsides to everything. 

Toni straightened and gestured at her workbench. “It’s done.”

Yinsen examined the it in question, pondering it with a thoughtful expression, circling the table to look at it at different angles, pulling at his beard. Finally, he said, “I have absolutely no idea what that is.”

“Miniature arc reactor,” Toni said. She started to mentally outline the technical explanation, then remembering her audience began the nontechnical pretend-I’m-five explanation, then again remembering her audience said, “It’s a form of fusion power. Puts out eight gigajoules per second, and while it’s not quite a perpetual motion machine is close enough for government work. The previous smallest version took up the entirety of Stark Industries’s basement. In short,” Toni said, “my next Nobel-worthy discovery.”

Yinsen raised his eyebrows. “Next? Admittedly, I haven’t read a newspaper in a while, but I wasn’t aware that you’d won any Nobels.”

“The committee is biased against me,” Toni said.

“I see.”

“One time I blew the Princes of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in the bathroom at the awards ceremony.” 

“I see.”

“In my defense,” Toni said, “have you ever been to one of those things? They’re really boring.” 

Choosing not to comment further on this matter, Yinsen instead said, “I must admit I have absolutely no idea why, when you are supposed to be building Jericho missiles for the Ten Rings or, alternately, inventing some method of preventing yourself from dying or, alternately, single-handedly repairing every broken appliance in Afghanistan, you would instead choose to build a tiny power plant, however groundbr-- oh. Oh.” 

Toni smirked. Yinsen was, after all, not dumb. He was just not a physicist. And while those were often easily confused-- particularly by physicists-- it was a mistake to assume that they were the same thing. 

“You intend to put this arc reactor into your chest to power an electromagnet to keep the shrapnel from reaching your heart,” Yinsen said. 

“Well, no,” Toni said.

“Oh, good,” Yinsen said, “because that is probably the most colossally stupid idea I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s a bad idea to do surgery on yourself,” Toni continued. “Particularly when you have a world-class surgeon currently working as your research assistant.”

The expression Yinsen adopted was what Toni liked to think of as the Toni Stark Face. It was the face Obie had made when she said “actually, we can do that for half the price in a third of the time”, and Rhodey had made when she got a perfect score on her biochem final hungover and without having attended a single class, and her briefly-employed therapist had made when she said that she’d dealt with her parents’ death by building an artificial general intelligence, and Pepper had made when she’d walked in trying to sue Toni and walked out working for her. It looked rather like they’d just encountered an extremely science-oriented hurricane. 

“I took an oath,” Yinsen said. “First do no harm.” 

“May I remind you,” Toni said, “that the consequence of not doing me any harm is that I literally die.” Yinsen looked dubious. “And how do you think Raza will feel about the fact that I fixed a bunch of fridges instead of those missiles he wanted, and you knew about it?”

Yinsen sighed. “I’ll get my medical supplies, then.”

\--

Toni had previously believed there was no whiskey in Afghanistan. It turned out that this had one small exception for medicinal purposes.

As soon as Toni convinced Yinsen that existing while Toni counted as a medical condition, she was going to like this place-- mud houses, caterpillar-eyebrowed terrorists, and all. 

\--

“Raza wants a progress report,” Yinsen said. “You have five minutes. I suggest-- for both our sakes-- you come up with something good.”

Toni dropped the cell phone she was working on. Something shattered; some distant part of her mind thought fuck, how am I going to fix that; another, more distant part thought fuck yeah, I’m going to get to fix that; the third and noisiest part said, not unless we get out of this alive, and one disadvantage of Afghanistan is that we have no one to cover our asses when we fuck up. 

Toni tried to assess the state of the disaster. “Does he know about--”

“You being the magic woman?” Yinsen said. “No. The people of this village have no fondness for the Ten Rings, and a very great fondness for having newly well-functioning and energy-efficient electronics.”

“Self-interest, the universal motivator,” Toni found herself saying, her lips snarking automatically as her mind raced. 

Yinsen looked around the workshop, unimpressed. “Do you have anything that even looks like a Jericho missile?” 

“Not… as such. No.”

“What was your plan?” Yinsen asked. “Fix cars until Raza forgot you and went away?”

Well, sort of, not that she was going to admit it to Yinsen. It was just… there were people! With things she could fix! And they were proud of her! Toni had many strengths, but impulse control was not exactly one of them. And back home there hadn’t exactly been a surplus of people lining up to talk about how proud of her they were. 

To be honest, she’d been dawdling. She didn’t want to leave Afghanistan. When she got home, she would have to wear a nice dress that she wasn’t allowed to get motor oil on and go to press conferences and since she was the center of attention she probably couldn’t even sneak out early. And a bunch of people would tell her how inspirational she was and write articles where they edited out all the bits that weren’t about how you can Overcome Anything If You Try. Toni hated being inspirational. She’d solved the problem of being an inspirational woman by puking on a couple photographers, but she wasn’t sure if being an inspirational cripple would be such an easy Gordian knot to cut. 

Here, no one gave a shit if she were a woman or a cripple or a Martian as long as their cars ran. 

But Toni considered that, perhaps, it would have been a good idea to make something that she could at least pretend was the missile she was supposed to be working on, instead of the arc-reactor-powered light she was currently using to brighten her workbench. It was just that… working on the missiles meant that she would have to admit she was kidnapped and she had to escape. Working on the light meant that she could pretend, at least for a little while, that she could stay. 

Loud voices shouted in Arabic. “I hope you came up with an excellent explanation in the last five minutes,” Yinsen said. 

“Eh,” Toni said, “I always work best with deadlines.”

Raza stormed in. He seemed to either be very upset, or faking it well for intimidation purposes. Toni did her best cocky smirk, which she was definitely faking for intimidation purposes. 

Yinsen translated, “he says ‘when am I going to get to take advantage of the services of America’s most beloved mass murderer?’”

“Depends on which services,” Toni said. “If he wants to fuck me, I’m sure I can take thirty seconds out of my busy schedule. If he wants the missiles, he’ll have to be more patient.”

“I’m not translating that,” Yinsen said. 

“Well, that’s my response.”

Whatever politic thing Yinsen turned Toni’s statement into did not mollify Raza much. Yinsen said, “He has been sending his men here and there across the mountains hunting palladium. He has nothing to show for it.”

Toni was briefly tempted to flash Raza and show him exactly what his men got for their work. However, it was probably the better part of valor to reserve her defiance for things that could be smoothed out in translation. “The palladium wasn’t for me, it was for the arc reactor. Notice that I’m not dead, the way I would have been if I hadn’t made it. He’ll get a lot fewer missiles in the long run if his pet genius is a corpse. If he doesn’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden explosions, he needs to put up with it.”

That one prompted a relatively long exchange which was either about the science of the arc reactor or the exact plotline of the golden goose fairy tale. Yinsen finally said, “He says the goose has not laid anything for him. He says that if the goose does not get its act together, it may find itself being served for dinner.”

“I’m pretty sure Islam frowns on cannibalism.”

“Islam frowns on a lot of things the Ten Rings do,” Yinsen said. “Kidnapping and murder, for instance. But I think that last was more of a metaphor.”

“Tell him you can’t rush genius.”

A brief conversation, and: “Genius already made the missiles. It should take genius much less time to follow the plans and assemble them.”

Toni wanted to say something like ‘well, maybe genius doesn’t work well under pressure’, but, you know, she might be desperate, but some things were just completely off limits. She had her pride. Instead, she said, “he will get the Jericho missiles when he gets them.”

A very brief flurry of conversation, and then Yinsen said, “Raza wonders if your work would be a lot faster if he gave you a taste of what will happen if you don’t deliver. A little bit of motivation.”

“If Raza tortures me-- or you, or your children--” Toni said, “I’m not making him missiles.”

Yinsen lifted his eyebrows. 

“And, sure, maybe I’ll break under torture,” Toni continued, the words racing out of her mouth without her mind getting much input. “Lots of people do. Lots of people who are stronger and tougher and braver than I am. But I’ll tell you something. I have stared down political leaders and CEOs and paparrazzi and Pepper Potts. I graduated with a 5.0 from MIT as a functionally illiterate female eighteen-year-old. When my dad died, I built a human-level AI, because my dad had said it would never happen and I couldn’t think of a better testament to his memory than doing the impossible. I found out I was crippled and about to die, and I built revolutionary life-saving technology, in a mud hut, out of a bunch of scraps. I am stubborner than you, smarter than you, and I don’t take kindly to being threatened. And, hey, maybe you’ll be the one to break me. Better men than you couldn’t, but they couldn’t touch my body, and maybe that’s the one thing that’ll make me snap instead of spitting in your face. Maybe you’ll get lucky.” 

Toni paused. She saw an opportunity. She took it. 

“Do you feel lucky?” Toni asked. “Well, do ya, punk?”

As Yinsen translated this for Raza, Toni stared at the ground and thought: welp. I better not talk until the bullet goes through my head, because that speech was really badass, and I’d hate to have my last words be “aaaaaah”. 

But Yinsen said, “He will give you two weeks”, and Toni breathed for the first time in an hour.

Yinsen continued, “He understands the missiles may have been slow because you had to save your own life first, and he appreciates your wise management of his assets. After two weeks, he will talk to you about alternate motivational techniques.”

Toni glanced up at Raza. He was wearing the Toni Stark Face. 

Toni very carefully did not pump the air or show any sign of her jubilation. She vaguely remembered something Pepper had said to her about people being much nicer to you if you don’t humiliate them after you win, which, frankly, went against all of Toni’s instincts, but Pepper was usually right about such things. “Yinsen, can you say I said something diplomatic in response?”

“With pleasure.” 

\--

“You’re planning on escaping, aren’t you?” Yinsen asked, two hours after Raza left. Toni set aside the cell phone she had almost finished repairing. 

“I was planning on not telling you that,” Toni said. “People lie a lot more convincingly when they don’t actually know the truth, I’ve found. What tipped you off?”

“You didn’t make missiles in the last two weeks,” Yinsen said, “you’re not going to make them in the next two.” 

“Raza has to know he’s giving me more time to escape,” Toni said.

“You can’t walk,” Yinsen said. “He believes it limits your options. Keeps you prisoner more effectively than any guard.”

“You disagree.”

“Unlike Raza,” Yinsen said, “I have talked to you.”

“Keep going on like that,” Toni said, “and you’ll give me a swelled head.”

“It is my professional opinion as a doctor that your swollen head can hardly get any worse,” Yinsen replied. He glanced at Toni’s current projects spread out chaotically across the workbench; if he could figure out what she was going for, he gave no sign. “The electromagnet takes a tiny fraction of the arc reactor’s power. I assume you are intending to do something with the rest of it besides light your workbench. Build some guns, shoot your way out?”

“Yes,” Toni said, “definitely. And then when the team consisting of three children, an elderly surgeon, a cripple, and your wife manage to overcome dozens of highly trained terrorists that have successfully eluded the US army for decades, we will somehow manage to walk a week across the desert with no supplies to the nearest army base.”

“Well,” Yinsen said, “it’s not as bad as all that. The commotion will probably get the US Army to send someone over to check it out.”

“That was sarcasm,” Toni said. 

“For most people,” Yinsen said, “‘put an electromagnet in my chest powered by experimental fusion power technology’ is sarcasm. So forgive me if I’m perhaps not quite as talented at judging your sarcasm as might be hoped.”

“And the arc reactor is working out really well!” Toni said. “I’m hardly dead at all.”

Yinsen smiled in spite of himself. “So, killing a couple of dozen terrorists is the one problem you can’t solve through engineering?”

“Part of being able to fix everything is knowing what, exactly, you’re trying to fix.” Toni looked out into the distance. Which was about two feet, because of the wall, but it was the thought that counted. “I don’t need guns. I need to get us out of here.”

“How?”

“How?”

Toni gestured to the cell phone she was repairing. “Raza is not terribly bright, is he?”

“I have to say,” Yinsen said, “that Raza’s management style has been more often characterized by terror than it has by cleverness.” 

“To be fair to him,” Toni said, “cell phones have only started getting popular in the developing world in the past couple years, it’s not like he had to deal with it in most of his terroristing career. And his previous kidnapee”-- Toni gestured at Yinsen-- “is a presumed dead Afghan citizen who probably doesn’t even know the phone number of the British consulate, so no one gives a shit about you.”

“Thanks,” Yinsen said. 

“I, on the other hand,” Toni said, “can call Rhodey.” 

“Who will arrive for a torrid assignation, one assumes.”

“Who’s also known as Colonel James Rhodes of the U. S. Air Force,” Toni said, “and who is, at this point, more than used to saving my ass. Although, admittedly, usually in ways that involve more fast-talking and less shooting, and usually from problems I made myself.” She smiled fondly. “He will be so thrilled that for once he can kill people and none of this isn’t my fault.”

Yinsen said, “In our limited acquaintance, that is very possibly the least insane plan I’ve ever seen you come up with.” 

“My plans aren’t insane,” Toni said, “they’re just direct.”

Yinsen, judging from his expression, did not quite seem to see the difference.

“One question,” Yinsen said. “Is there a reason you haven’t called in the cavalry right now?” 

“Oh,” Toni said cheerfully, “I don’t want to use up one of Rhodey’s soldiers to carry me around, so I’m going to invent a suit that reads the neural signals from my brain and then moves the muscles of my legs for me, allowing me to walk.” 

Yinsen blanched. 

“Two weeks is plenty of time to revolutionize protheses, don’t you think?”

“Astaghfirullah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Astaghfirullah" translates literally as "I seek forgiveness from Allah" and is sometimes used as an expression of disapproval.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr user dataandphilosophy pointed out a PLOT HOLE, and then I had to fix the plot hole! So you should probably go back and read the last couple hundred words of chapter two *first* and then read this chapter.

Yinsen, kneeling, clipped the last of the motors onto Toni’s legs. “Done.” 

The sensor on her back had been unbearably awkward to position, Yinsen holding her up with one hand as he attached the sensor with his other. For once Toni had been pleased that she didn’t have any sensation in her legs. But fortunately she got to sit down when Yinsen put the suit on her legs. 

He stood up, eyeing it critically. “Is it going to work?”

“Of course it’s going to work. Since when have I built things that don’t work?” Toni said, an unaccountable lump in her throat. 

She looked at her feet and thought kick. 

For one heart-stopping moment, her feet were still. And then slowly they began to move. 

It felt more like telekinesis than it did like kicking her legs. Toni, after all, still couldn’t feel where her feet were, much less the dozens of sensations the abled take for granted: the pressure of her soles against the floor, the swish of air against the sides of her feet. Moving her feet-- something she had done without a thought every day of her life-- felt as alien as if she had thought up and the table had slowly floated into the air. 

Okay. Now to stand. 

Standing, it turned out, was a surprisingly complicated task if you had to think about each of the muscle movements individually. 

Yinsen helped Toni up. “I think,” he said gently, “in the future you should make sure your feet are on the ground before you try to get up.”

“Hey,” Toni said “don’t criticize. Your brain does this shit automatically.” 

“You need me to keep holding you up?”

“Nah, I got it.” Yinsen removed his hand from her back; Toni wobbled a little, but stayed upright. “It’d probably be a good idea to figure out what exactly I need to do before I try to step, though. Can I see you walk?” 

Yinsen took slow steps, slightly exaggerating his movements. Toni watched it with the carefulness she usually applied to reverse-engineering a competitor’s product. Lift, starting with the heel; step, moving from the knee; place the foot, shifting your weight forward as you peel the heel of your other foot off the ground. 

“I think I’ve got it,” Toni said finally. She tried to position her weight evenly-- not an easy task, given the lack of feedback from her legs-- and thought firmly: lift, step, place. 

It was achingly slow. Toni talked fast, thought fast, moved fast; she never walked when she could run, and she was never present in the moment when there was an engine she could be deconstructing in her mind. The suit forced her to think about every movement, to have a constant internal monologue of lift, step, place, lift, step, place. And even so she couldn’t go fast. Yinsen, trying to move slowly, crossed the room in half the time it took Toni. 

But, as her father had said, some things were like watching a dog balance on its hind legs. It was not done well, but it was remarkable enough that it was being done at all. 

And she could walk. She didn’t have to be carried. She could walk. 

“We should call Rhodey,” Toni said. 

“Not yet,” Yinsen said. “We have a half a week yet.”

“We don’t want to cut it close,” Toni said. “What if Raza wants to check up on our work again?”

“That’s why you made the fake bomb,” Yinsen said.

“What if he notices me walking?” Toni said. “You don’t think he’s going to have a couple of questions?”

“Which you can talk your way out of. Right now you’re as awkward as a colt, you’d probably be less of a burden being carried,” Yinsen said. “You need some practice in that thing. Stay out of sight, and if he stops by I’ll say that one of my sons took you to test your bombs away from the village. That’s plausible enough.” 

Toni considered it. She couldn’t find a flaw in the plan. “I’m taking the phone, though,” she said. “So I can text you if I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

With that, it was time to go for a walk. 

The door of the house was impossibly far away, a trek as far as the Arctic explorers had travelled to reach the North Pole-- which is to say, probably about six feet. Nevertheless, Toni endured and stepped outside. 

It was glaringly bright. Her eyes hurt; her brow wrinkled. 

“There’s a star in the sky during the day,” Toni said. “I’d almost forgotten in my years of captivity and suffering.” 

“Very funny,” Yinsen said.

Everything was marvelous, everything was new. The feel of a breeze against her cheek; the warmth of the sun against her shoulders; the sight of the horizon, miles and miles away. Toni almost felt like one of those people who took joy in everyday pleasures, who were mindfully aware of each experience as it occurred. It was pretty horrible and she hoped it would wear off quickly. 

She began to move, step after careful step. 

The people of the village didn’t pay much attention to Toni’s walking. A few looked at her and turned their heads, puzzled; but then she was obviously wearing some sort of mechanical device, and equally obviously she was the Magic Woman Who Could Fix Anything. Evidently, the idea that the Magic Woman Who Could Fix Anything could also get herself to walk did not seem particularly ludicrous. Probably the really ridiculous part, to their mind, was that she hadn’t done it before. 

Of course, she didn’t speak Arabic. For all she knew, they were gossiping about her rather than the sheep. She’d have to ask Yinsen when she got home. 

Toni kept her attention on lift, step, place, lift, step, place for a full five minutes, which is probably the longest period of time she’d concentrated on something so unutterably boring. It was mostly because she had just made the suit, and after she created anything she had a time of childish glee while she checked that it worked exactly the way she’d expected it to. But eventually her mind wandered off, thinking about potential improvements to the suit (could she power it on something less than the arc reactor? It seemed a bit excessive to give one to every quadriplegic, not to mention the cost of the palladium.) 

Toni wobbled, almost fell, caught herself. Wait. No. She needed to concentrate on walking. She supposed it was an interesting task to figure out how she was going to focus on making sure she didn’t fall down while (in a worst-case scenario) under fire from terrorists. But it was not a tremendously interesting task, because it wasn’t like she could make a machine to concentrate on walking for her. Well, not yet anyway-- where was Jarvis when you needed him? She wondered how quickly she could make a machine that walked for her, and whether it would take too much time to get used to using it for it to be worth making. Probably not while she was in Afghanistan, although once she was back in her workshop it would probably be a good thing to work on--

And she crumpled to the ground.

A goat looked at Toni very judgmentally.

Toni said, “I’d like to see you learn how to use a robot suit. There has not been a single case of a goat using a robot suit, and I bet you wouldn’t be any better at it than I am.”

The goat did not seem convinced. 

Ugh. How did people even stand up from falls anyway? Why did that have to be stored in muscle memory instead of conscious memory? Why hadn’t she brought Yinsen along to demonstrate falling too? 

She hoped that none of the people of this town would be gossiping about this. It would not do great things for her reputation. 

Toni double-checked that both her feet were firmly on the ground, then placed her hands behind her. Walking her hands forward, she pushed herself up into a sort of squat, then thought very firmly straighten. She watched her legs move-- as if under their own power-- until she was standing up. It was exhilarating, like watching the slow unfolding of a machine, except that the machine was her own body. 

In fact, she was so excited that she fell down again. 

Great. 

Toni walked until the sun began to set behind the horizon. She fell down an uncountable number of times, which was probably a good thing, all things considered: she got enough practice getting out of a fall that she could stand up in a single, fluid motion. By the end of the day, she was by no means fast, but she could move at about the same speed as Yinsen trying to be slow, and she could go a few minutes between getting distracted from the process of walking and landing on her butt. She saw no terrorists, which was probably just as well. She wasn’t very certain what she was supposed to hide behind in Afghanistan anyway. It’s not like there were many forests or, indeed, trees. 

Then she heard the noise. 

It was a bomb. A lot of people would fuck around with “well, it could have been a bomb, or it could have been something else that made such a loud noise”, but Toni was a weapons designer. She knew what a bomb sounded like. It was a bomb. 

Shit. 

Toni started to run. Some part of her mind distantly thought _oh, all I needed this whole time was a fucking bomb to go off, turns out the secret to making the suit work for you is all in motivation_. She fell, once or twice or three times; heedlessly, she pushed herself up and began to run again. Eventually she noticed that her hands were scraped and covered with desert sand and bits of blood were dripping on her arm. She didn’t feel pain. She kept running. 

With luck, someone had hit Raza. With luck their problems were solved and Toni would never need to worry about a terrorist ever again and Toni had enough time to get her really good at running, not that they really needed it now that there was no one to run from, and they could call Rhodey and escape and all Yinsen’s children would grow to be old. Without luck-- 

Well. 

Toni slowed as she approached the village. 

What used to be the village.

 _It’s an archaeological dig_ , she thought hysterically. The houses, unchanged in architectural style since the BCs, looked almost as if they were supposed to be that way: as if the roofs were caved in, the walls fallen down, because of the cruelty of time rather than of people. If she squinted, the debris could be from the process of excavation, and a grad student would be walking around the corner any second now eating his lunch. 

Not if she got close, though. If she got close, she would see bodies. 

She didn’t get close. 

Her heart raced in her chest. It was not entirely from exertion. 

“You idiots! They were in the mountains!” she shouted at the sky. “You fucking morons, the Ten Rings was in the mountains! This is just a village! They herd goats! They aren’t big fans of Americans, but they hate the Ten Rings even more! They protected me! They were going to help me escape! You bastards killed the wrong fucking people! You dumb! Fucks!”

No one could hear her, but it made her feel better. 

Yinsen was dead. Yinsen, his wife, his children-- they were dead. Yinsen was never going to meet Jarvis, or find out about all the scientific advances that had been made while he was in Afghanistan, or run around Oxford instead of Afghanistan and actually not look out of place for once. He had been there and now he was gone and there was nothing left of him and if she had finished the suit a week earlier or if she hadn’t dawdled around with repairing cell phones and fucking goddamn refrigerators or if she had called Rhodey this afternoon or if she had fucking skipped the stupid suit which who even needed that anyway being carried would probably slow them down much less than having her stumble in the suit--

If she had, then right now Yinsen would be alive. 

The rest of the villagers wouldn’t. Toni didn’t flatter herself that she would have bothered to check on where the US Army was planning to bomb, would have said “hey, just so you know, those people are completely inoffensive to everything except architecture.” But Yinsen would have been alive, and Toni was selfish enough in that moment that that was all she cared about. Her friend would be alive.

Christ. She was never going to find out what the villagers thought of her, walking around in her suit. She hoped they’d gotten a good laugh. They deserved it. 

Toni wondered if anybody’s last thought was about how silly-looking she’d been. 

She hadn’t said goodbye to Yinsen. She’d been so distracted by being able to walk that she hadn’t said goodbye. The last thing she’d said was some kind of ridiculous snarky thing about the fucking sun as if that fucking mattered. 

Toni had a horrified thought. She looked around until she found a bit of the shrapnel. She picked it up and looked at it. 

Her heart dropped out of her chest. 

It said STA. 

_“You don’t have to put your name on everything,” Obie said indulgently._

_“Of course I do,” Toni said. “How else will those camel-fuckers know who to be afraid of?”_

Toni did not, as a rule, regret things.

In fact, to be perfectly frank, the whole morality thing in general wasn’t really Toni’s strong suit. 

She had killed Yinsen, his wife, his children. Killed them as surely as if she’d dropped the bomb herself. She’d killed that family who was so happy when she’d repaired their cell phone. The man who had called her a magic woman. The goats who would not shut up when she was trying to sleep. The child who had laughed, delighted, when she made him a gyroscope, as if it were the first time in his life he’d seen such a thing (and it probably was). 

She hoped they’d died without pain. She hoped she’d had given them at least that much.

Her next realization came to her like the perfect way to prove a theorem she’d been puzzling over for weeks: in a sudden rush of clarity, thoughts tripping over each other, clicking so quickly that she could hardly imagine the way she’d thought before. Stark bombs had been dropped on, Stark weapons had killed, a lot of people. She hadn’t met most of them; she hadn’t been able to talk to any of them except Yinsen.

But… the ones she hadn’t met weren’t any different than the ones she had. Their children were delighted by gyroscopes too. Their goats made loud annoying noises in the middle of the night. They joked, they told stories, they dreamed of a better future. This one had been planning on asking the woman he loved to marry him. That one had been writing a song that would now never be finished. Another one had been in school and now would never, never learn what letter of the alphabet came after ‘C’. 

And none of them, none of them, deserved to die. 

Probably not even all the terrorists deserved to die. Raza, sure, she’d spit on his grave. But the terrorist who had carried her on his back, professional even though she was his captive, professional even though her crippling had cost the lives of several of his friends and her bombs had cost the lives of many more-- if the army had aimed those bombs true, was his death something she could take pride in? 

He had a mother, maybe. A mother who would have waited the rest of her life for her child to come home. 

He had killed. But then, so had Toni. 

And if she couldn’t wish that man dead-- a man who, to be fair, had kidnapped her and was currently a member of an Islamic terrorist organization-- then how could she possibly feel about the deaths of countless villagers?

Toni had taken pride in this. She had thought to herself, “I build weapons that kill people better and faster than anyone else”, and it hadn’t ever occurred to her that there was something fucked up about this. That maybe your life’s work shouldn’t be wiping out a village so well that you can hardly tell it apart from an archaeological dig. 

Children. She’d killed children, more children than she would ever be able to name. Four-year-olds solemnly playing a game comprehensible only to themselves, a six-year-old girl skipping, a toddler sneaking away from her mother to play in the flour-- wiped out. In an instant. 

Better living through technology. 

She imagined briefly blood dripping from her hands, a line of ghosts walking behind her. 

What was it Raza had called her? A mass murderer. Too right.

Toni wished that she’d stayed in the village instead of taking her new suit out for a stroll. The mass murderer killed by her own weapons. It would have been poetic. Fitting. 

If you had asked Toni before today, she would have thought of guilt as the feeling she had when her mother had caught her stealing cookies from the fridge, or Pepper had caught her snoozing during a very important board meeting. A sort of embarrassment, combined with resentment about being caught, and the desire to appease whoever it was so that they wouldn’t be angry at her anymore, and a desperate need to pretend that whatever it was hadn’t happened. 

Guilt wasn’t like that. 

Howard Stark had called it the Stark gift. Toni could look at something that wasn’t working right and see ways to optimize it, to make it more efficient, to repair whatever had gone wrong. And whenever something was broken it _itched_ , it fussed at the back of her mind until she made it right. Obie had learned very quickly that if you wanted Toni to continue to invent more things (more _weapons_ ) Toni’s apartment and workshop had to be the first priority for Stark Industries maintenance. 

Guilt was that sort of itch. But instead of being directed at faucets or bombs, it was directed at herself. 

She was broken.

But she had never, not once, found anything that she couldn’t fix. 

It was time to go home. She flipped open the cell phone. She had nothing to stay for.


	4. Chapter 4

The press conference wasn’t the first thing Toni did when she got back from Afghanistan.

Normally, Toni’s attitude to her duties as CEO is that if she ignored them sufficiently hard then someone else would take care of them and leave her alone to build shit. Toni believed this was called “delegation” and they wrote whole business books about how great a practice it was. Unfortunately, for some reason, no one would let her delegate press conferences, and every couple of months she had to put on a dress and tell everyone about how Stark Industries stock had risen blah percent in the whatever quarter.

She would have to give a press conference about coming back from Afghanistan. That much was clear. But there were a few things she could deal with first. 

The first thing she did-- now that she was in a nice country, a civilized country, a country where the religions that forbade alcohol stayed in the South where they belonged-- was to get completely stinking drunk. There may have been weeping. The only person to witness it was Jarvis, and Jarvis was sworn to secrecy in every atom of his silicon mind. The second thing she did, once she’d nursed her hangover to a manageable state, was to call Pepper. 

Sometimes people assumed Pepper was Ms. Stark, CEO of Stark Industries. It was a reasonable deduction. Pepper wore a neatly tailored business suit and tasteful professional makeup, her hair drawn back into a bun that was half schoolmarm and half “I hope you know that I can completely kick your ass using only a spreadsheet and without ever raising my voice”. Toni, on the other hand, wore her motor-oil-stained cargo pants to galas whenever she could get away with it and was still slightly confused about what a lip stain looked like when it was at home. Toni liked to watch them suck up to Pepper for ten or fifteen minutes before she revealed that she was actually Dr. Stark’s personal assistant. It was funny. 

“I want to know what’s up with the Stark Foundation,” Toni said once Pepper had appeared. 

Pepper, who had weathered far odder requests over the years, didn’t miss a beat. It was why she was Toni’s favorite personal assistant. 

“Well, it’s mostly a tax shelter,” Pepper said. “We’re donating heavily to programs to get teens involved in science, mostly so we can scout new people to hire at Stark Industries. Some arts funding, mostly so you can easily get tickets to shows you want to go to. Some programs to encourage safe driving, because of your parents. A lot of anti-fracking funding--”

“What?” Toni said. “Why?”

“Remember when you were trying to seduce Mark Ruffalo?”

“Oh yeah,” Toni said. He was damn cute. 

“We never had a reason to switch the money out of it,” Pepper said. “You never took an interest before.”

“Okay, so, we’re giving all our money to stupid bullshit,” Toni said.

“One hundred percent,” Pepper said. “Well, some of the fracking stuff is actually decent.”

“I very much doubt I made ideal charitable decisions while I was thinking with my clit.” Toni ignored how much that sentence sounded like Yinsen’s quiet British snark, leaned back in her chair, looked at the ceiling, and bit her lips as she thought. “I want to move all of the Stark Foundation’s grants to projects that primarily improve the developing world. I want the best value for money I can get. The most lives saved per dollar. Tell someone to prepare a summary of the relevant research.”

“You’re not going to lay out some very vague objectives, wave a hand and say ‘Pepper, deal with it?’” Pepper said.

Toni was tempted. Pepper was, after all, tremendously competent; next to Obie, she was the person who had taken over the most of the CEO work Toni had delegated. Before she’d hired Pepper, she’d had to devote three or four hours a week to actual CEO-ing. Afterward, all she had to do was sign things. And Stark Industries ran well, judging from the occasional articles Jarvis read to her from Business Week. They kept praising Toni’s vision. 

But this was the new Toni. The reformed Toni. The Toni who took things seriously even if they weren’t fun. 

“No,” Toni said. “I trust you, but this is something I want to do on my own.” 

The third thing Toni did was the press conference. 

As strange as it seemed, Toni was looking forward to the press conference. She was pretty pleased with herself. This was excellent behavior for The New Toni, the Toni who Took Her Responsibilities Seriously and Did Good In The World and Joyfully Went To Press Conferences Even If They Were Really Boring.

Besides, the faces on the board members when they finally found out what she would be announcing! It was going to be hilarious. Toni kind of wanted to skip the whole press conference part. 

Obie’s eyebrows lifted as Toni wheeled herself into the room, and he hurried over.

“I was so relieved to hear that you’re all right,” he said. “I don’t know how we would have run Stark Industries without you.”

“Poorly,” Toni agreed. 

Obie suddenly seemed to notice that Toni was now several inches shorter than she used to be. “You’re in a wheelchair.”

“Yes,” Toni said. “You may not have heard, but I recently got kidnapped by terrorists in Afghanistan, and shrapnel from one of my own--” 

“Pepper briefed me,” Obie said. “I thought you made”-- he gestured vaguely-- “a robot suit or some such. So you can walk.”

“I did,” Toni said. “Because they don’t have wheelchairs in Afghanistan. Or roads. But… it’s not a great piece of tech. I move slowly. I fall a lot.” She grinned. “And I can go ten miles per hour in this thing.”

“But you can walk,” Obie said. 

“...Yes,” Toni said. 

“So why aren’t you walking?”

“Because I like getting places?” Toni said. “I can walk slowly and fall down, or I can move quickly in a wheelchair, why the hell would I pick the first one?”

Obie shook his head. “It just-- it doesn’t look good in front of our shareholders.” 

Toni did not quite see why she needed to care about looking good in front of the shareholders. The shareholders were the ones who felt that she needed to wear a dress.

But they didn’t get to talk about this issue any further, because it was time for the press conference to begin. Toni headed for the stage. 

Pepper had explained to her the talking points. Blah blah I was kidnapped by terrorists blah blah no change in Stark Industries blah blah perfectly healthy blah blah do you have any questions. Toni hoped that she wouldn’t take too much offense if Toni interpreted them… creatively. 

“I am Dr. Antoinette Stark, CEO of Stark Industries,” Toni said, once the room settled down. “About a month ago, while demonstrating Stark Industries’s new Jericho missiles, I was kidnapped by members of the Ten Rings, a terrorist organization operating in the mountains of Afghanistan, who wished me to build weapons for them instead of for the US government. In the firefight, a piece of shrapnel severed my spine, rendering me unable to walk; it was slowly approaching my heart and would have killed me within two weeks.

“Instead, I built a miniature arc reactor which-- well, I won’t get into the gory technical details, but it ensures that the shrapnel won’t reach my heart and that I will stay alive. The arc reactor isn’t just good for shrapnel, however: it is a completely clean power source which Stark Industries will be rolling out for civilian use within the next few years. I also built a robot suit that permitted me to walk on Afghanistan’s rocky terrain, although as you can see, given the current bugginess of the technology, I prefer a wheelchair for everyday use.

“I was aided by Dr. Hao Yinsen of Oxford University, who had also been kidnapped by the Ten Rings, along with his wife and children.” Toni noticed her eyes getting bleary and her voice shaking. She kept going. “Before we could be rescued, Yinsen and his family, along with an entire village of innocents, died in an American bombing using Stark missiles. If I hadn’t been away testing my robot suit, I would have died as well. In his honor, I am renaming the Stark Foundation the Yinsen Foundation and pivoting it to focus on global health and development.

“Being in Afghanistan gave me time to rethink a few things. From this day forward, Stark Industries will no longer manufacture weapons. We will break all currently active contracts with the Defense Department. I will instruct our lawyers to aggressively pursue any other corporations we believe to be using our patented technology to construct weapons.”

Across the room, Obie’s face turned pale white. 

“I will now accept questions.”

A dozen reporters started talking at once. Toni zeroed in on one likely-looking one. “Ma’am, how will this affect Stark Industries’s stock prices?”

“Poorly, I’d imagine,” Toni said, “but that isn’t nearly as important as preventing the slaughter of innocents currently perpetuated by the US government.”

“Would you say,” another reporter asked, “that the loss of your legs inspired you to a new emphasis on peace and justice?” 

“Well, no,” Toni said, “I would say that my new emphasis on peace and justice is inspired by the fact that I just realized that I’m responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. Why? Do you think I should break your spine to make you more compassionate?” 

“So you’re saying that Stark Industries’s previous work was unethical?” a third man asked.

“I wouldn’t say that exactly,” Toni said. Obie’s face acquired color for the first time in five minutes. “Unethical is a really mild term, don’t you think? That sounds like we were running a red light or shaving a few hundred dollars off our tax bill. I would call what we did evil.” 

Pandemonium broke out. The one thing Toni could hear was Obie’s voice shouting “no more questions! No more questions!” 

\--

The headlines were amazing. 

The New York Times’s “Stark CEO: my company ‘evil’” quoted an anonymous government official calling her ‘irresponsible’. (Toni felt that not bothering to check whether you were killing innocent people was irresponsible, but what did she know?) Fox News pundits called Toni a traitor, speculated about whether this was caused by her daddy issues, and (to Toni’s especial delight) claimed that she was brainwashed by the Ten Rings into destroying America. Jon Stewart compared her to a sorority girl who took her first women’s studies course and became a Marxist, remarking: “there are real problems, but this sort of simplistic solution is what we normally expect from Republican presidential candidates’ tax plans”. 

Jarvis made Toni a compilation of the best responses and she listened to it whenever she was upset. By the time she got around to Fox News Toni Was Brainwashed Guy, she was always cheered up. 

Not everyone was so against her press conference. In fact, Toni managed to get halfway through an interview with Rolling Stone. 

“So,” the Rolling Stone reporter had said, “how has the loss of your ability to walk changed your view on the world?”

“It’s made it about a foot lower,” Toni said. 

“I mean, metaphorically,” the reporter said. “You know, your perspective. Your outlook on life.”

“I have discovered a new commitment to accessibility and universal design,” Toni said. “I think Stark Industries is probably going to specialize in making products for the disabled. I tell you, there are some serious improvements that need to be made in the field of cabinetry--”

“You came back from Afghanistan a very different person than who you started out as,” the reporter said. 

“I discovered first-hand the effects I was having on the world,” Toni said, “and I decided I couldn’t stand for it anymore and yes that pun is completely deliberate.”

“You know, it’s very inspirational,” the reporter said, “how well you’ve been able to bounce back from the tragedy that you’ve experienced.”

“Oh, not at all,” Toni said. “Hardly compared to you. I can only imagine the struggle you’ve faced. I’ve only been a cripple for a couple months, whereas you’ve had to live as an enormous sack of shit for your entire life.” 

Toni was getting really good at giving an impression of stomping her feet as she stormed out without actually being able to move them. 

\--

Toni had good intentions. Really, honestly she did. It was just that she didn’t realize being a good person involved having to go to so many meetings. 

The board was livid. But eventually they’d had to admit that, after all, Toni Stark was the CEO, and she did own most of the shares, and she had announced it in front of everyone, so there really wasn’t a hell of a lot they could do about the situation. They’d kept talking about it long past when they should have admitted Toni’s obvious victory, though. Toni was glad she had Obie on her side.

But most of the meetings wore out their welcome far sooner than the board meeting had. 

She’d immersed herself in the literature on public health, development economics, climate change, trying to figure out the best candidates for the Yinsen Foundation’s donation budget, Jarvis reading her the papers while she took notes on her thought process in her custom-made holographic mind-mapping software. Toni was, by nature and nurture, an engineer, not a scientist: it was her job to take the discoveries that scientists had made in their ivory-tower laboratories and transform them into something that fulfills the needs of her customers (a phrase which, until recently, had meant “make much bigger explosions than anyone could before”). 

She’d hoped an analogous process could apply to philanthropy. But, tragically, philanthropy seemed to not quite be a science. Her mind map grew a lot of nodes that pointed to the test tube which signified “basic research”, and which was closely linked to the nodes that meant “randomized controlled trials” and “nobody has bothered to test whether any of their programs outperform writing people a check. Why would they not test this? If your program doesn’t work better than just cutting someone a check, you shouldn’t be fucking doing it.” 

Toni was pleased by Poverty Action Lab, who honestly were the only people who had their heads on right, being at MIT. Damn straight. School pride. 

But unfortunately The New Toni, The Toni Who Took Her Responsibilities Seriously, couldn’t just decide what to do and then tell Pepper to do it. Apparently she had to “go to meetings” and “listen to key stakeholders” and “come to decisions about how the money should be allocated”.

Toni hoped that somewhere up in Paradise Yinsen was really appreciating this.

For the past two hours, some guy had been droning on about the optimal way to give money to deworming initiatives from a tax and investment perspective. Toni felt the distinct urge to throw a pencil at his head. 

Obie was right: there ought to be a way to make the suit work so that she didn’t need the wheelchair. But using it to walk was a dead end-- she’d never be able to program a computer to walk as well as a toddler could, much less a fully-grown adult. 

Ugh. No. She had to focus. Tax deductions. Yes. This was tremendously interesting. Definitely what she wanted to be doing right now. 

What she needed was something simpler. Easier to program. Something that minimized the movements her computer would have to calculate to only those necessary to make her move. Perhaps if she hovered…

Toni began sketching out rough equations on a piece of paper. If she bent the right way, it looked like she was taking notes-- at least, if you didn’t know that Toni was dyslexic enough that there would be no point. Which Pepper did. Eh, you couldn’t win all of them. 

Hovering wouldn’t use up a fraction of the arc reactor’s power. It would be a waste not to use the power for something else. Perhaps guns… 

\--

“You built power armor,” Pepper said. 

Toni had been hoping Pepper would sound impressed. Pepper did not sound impressed. 

“What on earth were you planning on doing with power armor?” Pepper asked in the voice she usually reserved for dealing with recalcitrant corporations. 

“Well,” Toni said, “I was thinking of getting Jarvis to figuring out where the US government was bombing, and then stopping the bombs. Once the US government has figured out that I’m not going to let them bomb people anymore, I was planning on expanding to all sorts of wars. Whenever people fight, I show up and beat up everyone, on both sides, until they realize that fighting is a bad idea.”

“Toni,” Pepper said gently, “why did we invade Iraq?”

“Because we thought that they had weapons of mass destruction,” Toni said. “Except they didn’t.” 

“Toni,” Pepper said, “how do you think the US government is going to respond to a non-state actor having a weapon of mass destruction?”

“Oh.”

“Particularly if they then use it to engage in acts of war against the United States?”

“So you’re saying this is a bad idea,” Toni said. 

“I think you can create world peace, or build really awesome weapons,” Pepper said. “‘Both’ might be a bit much to ask for.” 

Toni looked at the Mark I suit. “Pep, I have one skillset,” she said. “And it’s really not sitting in meetings.” 

“I know,” Pepper said. “I’ll take over some of those meetings for you. And the arc reactor is really good! We’ll be getting those into production--”

“Dr. Stark,” came Jarvis’s smooth, cultured voice. “A Mr. Rumlow is here to see you.” 

“Tell him to get an appointment,” Pepper said crossly. “We’re busy.” 

“I believe that you will want to hear what he has to say. It may solve both of your problems,” Jarvis said. The door to Toni’s workshop opened. 

The man-- Rumlow-- was about six feet and six inches of solid muscle. Toni had heard men described as “solid muscle” before: artistically sculpted men who designed their bodies as much for aesthetics as for ability. Rumlow was not that. He was simply massive: as though one day he had woken up and thought “my muscles should be bigger” and had never bothered to stop. One of his arms was probably the size of Toni’s thigh. 

“Dr. Stark,” Rumlow said. “I am here to talk to you about the Ultimates Initiative.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Which The Author Pauses The Story For A Chapter To Infodump About Effective Altruism, Inspiration Porn, And Why It's Okay To Use A Wheelchair Even If You Can Walk Sometimes. 
> 
> [Poverty Action Lab](http://www.povertyactionlab.org/) is a real thing and it is really cool. Toni's interest in writing people a check is a reference to [Give Directly](https://www.givedirectly.org/). I am imagining the Yinsen Foundation as being similar to [GiveWell](http://www.givewell.org/) and, probably, given Toni's penchant for the new and exciting, its subsidiary the [Open Philanthropy Project](http://www.openphilanthropy.org/).


	5. Chapter 5

“I represent a secretive organization that has been dedicated to cultivating peace and security around the world for the past seventy years,” Rumlow said. He had somewhat of the air of a man who had been drilled endlessly on his speech and who was going to make sure that he’d got it right. What Pepper wanted Toni to be during press conferences. “We have been following your return home from Afghanistan with great interest, and your public statements have led us to believe that you are sympathetic to our goals. We have been considering the creation of a small, agile strike force to respond to the existential risks which humanity faces in this new century, which we call the Ultimates Initiative. Given your legendary skill as a weapons designer, we were hoping that you would outfit our team. Of course, we don’t expect you to take a combat role--”

“Oh,” Toni said. “That’s too bad. Because I literally just made power armor that only works if I use it.” She grinned. “It’s pretty great! I can fly!”

Rumlow recovered smoothly. “I am certain a direct position on the team could be opened for you,” Rumlow said. “In fact, your interest in taking a combat role is excellent for our purposes, as so far the Ultimates Initiative only has one member for you to outfit. When we noticed that you were potentially sympathetic, we wanted to jump at the chance, however premature it my seem.”

“Before I got picked up by some other secretive organization?” Toni asked. “Didn’t want the NSA to poach me?” 

“There are a lot of unscrupulous people out there,” Rumlow said. “No doubt several of them have had the same idea we have. But while we want to protect humanity from existential risk, other organizations would want to use your power for their own purposes-- which neither you nor I would much approve of.”

“Okay, step one,” Toni said. “Prove to me you’re not some random crazy guy who has somehow managed to hoodwink Jarvis into thinking you’re worthy of talking to me.” 

“Remember how the Cuban Missile Crisis led to worldwide nuclear war that killed billions and plunged the world into nuclear winter from which it has never recovered?” Rumlow asked.

“No.”

“You’re welcome,” Rumlow said. “Our guy. Vasili Arkhipov. I believe your computer…?”

“Mr. Rumlow showed me a video testimonial encrypted with Mr. Arkhipov’s private key which provided a second message that only the organization he worked for would be able to decrypt,” Jarvis said. “Mr. Rumlow decrypted it, which is why I permitted him to enter the building.”

Rumlow shook his head. “It is so weird to have someone talk to you out of the walls.”

“You get used to it,” Toni said. “Thank you, Jarvis.” She turned back to Rumlow. “Of course, you might have stolen the testimonial and the secret organization's private key. So basically whether I trust you depends on how much I trust your organization's security.”

“Well,” Rumlow said, “we’ve been around for at least forty years, and you haven’t heard of us yet, so I’d say we’re pretty good at it. ”

He had a point. 

“The Cuban Missile Crisis was terrible,” Rumlow said philosophically. “But it’s very useful. Most of our work is secret; I’ve probably saved humanity from annihilation half a dozen times just by myself, and you’ve never heard of me or any of the things I prevented. It used to cause so many problems when we tried to recruit people. They thought we were just conspiracy theorists. Or so I’m told. I’ve always had Arkhipov’s testimonial myself.” 

“Let me guess,” Toni said, “if the Ultimates Initiative gets off the ground, I’m going to be delegated to tell everybody that you save the world, so that you can stop using the dead guy and having to explain to everyone what the fuck a private key is.” 

“Well, with your consent,” Rumlow said, “that would be very welcome.” 

“Second question,” Toni said, “before you got here, Pepper was talking about the US government taking a dim view of people using their weapons of mass destruction to enforce world peace. It likes to have a monopoly on such things.”

“We do not control the US government,” Rumlow said. “It would be run far better if we did. Our enemies still play many prominent leadership roles. But we can push through certain political favors-- one of which is keeping you safe from prosecution.”

“Third and final question, and this one is graded,” Toni said. “Lots of people saved the world once. Probably even Hitler would save the world from nuclear annihilation. I don’t exactly have a great track record for being hired by people who don’t commit atrocities. Explain to me that you’re not evil.” 

“You know Hulk?” he asked. 

“Big green guy,” Toni said. “Don’t get him angry, you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.” 

“Did you know that of the last dozen Hulk sightings eight were directly the product of military intervention?” Rumlow said. “He was left in the hands of soldiers and SWAT teams, and they didn’t know how to deal with it, and people died.”

“Okay, but Hulk’s not really that big a deal,” Toni said. “He hangs out in the Amazon somewhere. I doubt his casualties are more than a dozen people.” 

“It alerted us to the danger,” Rumlow said. “Hulk is a containable problem-- not least because he wishes to be left alone. But he is just a harbinger of what’s to come. Historically, we have typically chosen to adopt a role in the shadows. Encouraging warlike individuals to consider diplomacy. Getting key legislation passed. Subverting totalitarian governments, criminal syndicates, and terrorist organizations from the inside. However, after Harlem, we have come to agree that we must take proactive steps to cope with the rise of superhumans developed by new technology and perhaps prevent the destruction of the Earth. Hence the Ultimates.” 

“You keep saying ‘we’,” Toni said. “We have chosen, we agree, we dance the hula. Who is ‘we’? CIA? NSA? FBI?”

“We are too secret to have initials,” Rumlow said. 

“So you’re the agency without initials,” Toni said. “AWI for short.” 

“Something like that,” Rumlow said. “I myself have been reassigned from my previous work to be the handler of the team. My previous background was mostly in corporate sabotage and the odd assassination--”

“Wait,” Toni said, “you’re trying to convince me to join you and you just admitted to killing people?”

“Would you rather I shoot one person,” Rumlow asked, “or that he declare a war that will kill hundreds of thousands? I assure you, we believe every death is a tragedy, and killing people is our absolute last resort. A policy the US government would be wise to adopt.”

Toni could see his logic. Imagine if someone had shot her back when she was in MIT! So many people would still be alive. Not, of course, that she endorsed people killing her-- Toni was rather a fan of breathing-- but nevertheless it made sense. 

“We believe the ends justify the means,” Rumlow said. “Of course, that’s usually something said by Bond villains immediately before firing their death ray, but Bond villains are usually firing a death ray to blow up the Moon so that they can kill millions of people.”

“And,” Toni said, “if you use a terrible end to justify a terrible means, no shit, the outcome’s terrible.” 

“We knew we correctly identified that you sympathized with our values,” Rumlow said. 

 

“Which are?” Toni said.

“Our first priority is the preservation of the human species against the threat of existential risk,” Rumlow said. “None of our goals can be accomplished unless the human species continues. Our second priority is peacefulness and security. We work for a world without war, without violence.” 

“Great,” Toni said. “Everyone has a nice little set of corporate values. It sounds like it came from that fucking board meeting where we decided that Stark Industries’s mission statement was about Innovation and Quality.”

Rumlow nodded. “The world is unfair,” he said. “I don’t think anyone really gets, on a fundamental level, how unfair it is. We think of it like… it’s some sort of video game or something, where you won’t ever get a problem that you’re not strong enough to face. They say ‘everything works out for the best’ as if there’s any guarantee that that’s true. A peasant in the tenth century dies because they didn’t know to bathe and to quarantine those who are ill-- dies, because they were compassionate enough not to want to leave the side of the person they love. And there is nothing they could have done differently. They can’t make up the germ theory of disease single-handedly. There is no fairness in the universe. No justice. Nature’s challenges aren’t scaled to be something you can handle. If you fail, you pay the price, and if you fail hard enough, you die. Nature is neutral. It’s the most horrifying fact I know.” He sounded, for the first time in the conversation, human. “So that’s what we fight for. Making the universe less neutral. Putting up some safety rails, some protections. Making it so people can fail-- if they fall down, they skin their knees-- but they don’t have one split second of inattention and get hit by a car, they don’t die because they have a disease that we haven’t figured out how to cure yet. There’s nothing in the laws of the universe that says that everything works out for the best. But there will be. We will be.” Rumlow shrugged. “Sorry. I get passionate.” 

Toni grinned. “Consider yourself in possession of your second Ultimate.”

\--

“The Winter Soldier,” Rumlow said. “The man you’ll be working alongside.”

The Winter Soldier seemed like the sort of person Toni would take an instant fondness to. He had a silver prosthetic arm with a red Soviet star on it; since coming back from Afghanistan, Toni had felt an instinctive sense of community with anyone else whose limbs didn’t work right, and she would no doubt feel much more community with another person whose lost limbs had turned them into a badass superhero. He was quite good looking, in spite of his sallow skin; he had the strong jawline, thick lips, and three days of stubble of a male model. His long dark hair, though currently greasy and stringy, would no doubt be quite attractive if it were given a good wash. And he wasn’t wearing a shirt, showing off his muscles that-- although far less impressive than Rumlow’s-- Toni would have certainly loved to examine more closely in other circumstances. 

However, in the current circumstances, Toni was feeling far too icky for lust. Toni perhaps could have understood the machinery around Winter Soldier given free reins and ten hours, but as it was it was incomprehensible; this must be how mere mortals without her talents felt around every machine. He sat in a sort of black chair and was hooked up to various machines which beeped and flashed; his head was held in a pincer which, if Toni had to guess, probably did something to his brain-- although what she had no clue. His arms and legs were tied firmly to the chair, but there didn’t seem to be much point, because he was utterly unmoving; only his chest’s gentle rise and fall showed that he was alive. His eyes were shut and all the muscles in his face were slack. Three or four technicians swarmed around him, treating his body the same way they treated the machinery; just so many tools for them to use. 

Toni eyed Rumlow critically. “Uh. Did you mean to show me someone who’s comatose?”

“The Winter Soldier spends most of his time in cryosleep,” Rumlow said. “Hence ‘Winter’. Takes him a while to wake up. We didn’t manage to finish the procedure before you asked to see him. Cryo erases all his experiential memories, so don’t expect him to make very good conversation. Hell of a fighter, though.”

“He’s ready, sir,” a technician said. 

Rumlow didn’t even bother to glance at the Winter Soldier. “Wake him up.”

The Winter Soldier screamed. 

It would have been traditional for Toni to compare his scream to that of a wounded animal, to characterize it as inhuman. No doubt many people had over the years. But that wasn’t true. It was too human, far too human for comfort. It sounded eerily like the screams at a rock concert-- if it wasn’t for the razor-sharp edge of pain. Or like the screams of a child-- if it weren’t obvious that the lungs and vocal cords which produced that sound were fully adult. It sounded like what Toni had felt when Yinsen died. It hurt. She felt an instinctive urge to rush over to the chair, shove away the technicians, and rip the machinery off his body. Anything to help him. 

The technicians were busy adjusting knobs and glancing at checklists. Rumlow whistled. No one seemed to care. 

“You know,” Toni said conversationally, “if I didn’t know any better, I would begin to doubt your commitment to a world without pain.”

“We picked him up from the Russians after the USSR fell,” Rumlow said. “Both the US and the USSR were working on super-soldier programs. Trying to create the next Captain America. All of their programs wound up trading off skill against stability.” His face was flat. “This one is rather more to the skill side than most.”

The scream continued, piercing, underlying Rumlow’s words. 

“It sounds like you’re torturing him,” Toni said.

“If we could do anything else,” Rumlow said, “we would. We’ve tried not putting him in cryosleep. After a month, he gets erratic. Violent. He killed three of our best men trying to sedate him.” Rumlow shook his head. “I don’t like what we’re doing to him either. But it’s the best option we have. We don’t use his abilities for evil. We don’t mistreat him if there is any other possible way to protect others. As cruel as we are, he’s better off in our hands than he was in the hands of the Russians.” Rumlow looked at Winter Soldier for perhaps the first time since he entered the room. “It’s this or shoot him like a rabid dog, and-- as much pain as he’s in right now-- I still think he’d rather be alive.” 

The scream had become nothing but intermittent yelps. The Winter Soldier’s face was contorted in pain. 

“Hell of a choice,” Toni said. 

“On a certain level, I’m glad I’m working alongside him,” Rumlow said. “It’s a reminder of what we’re fighting for. Another example of Nature’s implacable neutrality.” 

The screams had stopped. The Winter Soldier was shaking his head and blinking, as if even the dim light were too bright. 

Toni peered at the machinery, wondering if she’d be able to figure out how the machine worked. No such luck, not unless she’d gotten a glance at the innards. The AWI was clever. She’d palmed a flash drive with a virus on it to find out what dirty little secrets they were hiding, but Rumlow had kept so close an eye on her that she hadn’t had a chance to plug it in. And she highly doubted the Winter Soldier usually lived in the basement of a bank; they’d clearly moved him here so that she could meet him without them bringing someone so inquisitive to their headquarters. They had hired her, but they didn’t trust her. 

Smart. It made her have more faith in their private key. 

Winter Soldier seemed like he’d gotten settled. Toni asked, “What’s your name?” 

“I don’t have a name,” the Winter Soldier said. 

“Look,” Toni said, “if we’re going to be on the same team, I can’t go around calling you ‘the Winter Soldier’ the whole time. Too many fucking syllables. Everyone has a name.”  
The Winter Soldier thought about it. “Sometimes they call me the asset.”

“That’s not a name either!” Toni said. “That’s what you call, like, a stock that you’re investing in. That’s not what you call a person.”

“I am not a person,” the Winter Soldier objected.

Clearly the commies had done a number on this one. “Well, person or not, I’m not calling anyone who can talk back to me ‘the asset’,” Toni said. “Give yourself a name.”

The Winter Soldier thought about it. “Roger,” he decided. “I don’t know why, but I really like the name ‘Roger.’”

Toni considered him again. He didn’t look much like a Roger-- her mental image of a Roger was a sort of all-American beauty, the kind of guy who played football and vaguely resembled a golden retriever. But then the Winter Soldier had clearly not been allowed to decide much in his life, even now that he was working for people who weren’t made of pure evil, and if he decided he wanted to be named Roger, then by God he ought to be named Roger. 

“Hello Roger,” Toni said. “I’m Toni. I’m the second member of the Ultimates Initiative. We are going to save the world together.” 

“Hello Toni,” Roger said. He seemed to notice for the first time that she was in a wheelchair. “If you’re an asset like me, you aren’t a very good asset. Are they going to give you new legs?”

“I considered that, it won’t work,” Toni said, ignoring the bit about being an asset, “the problem’s in my spine. So I made a power armor suit I can fly around in, it works quite well… although I imagine it would be kind of off-putting to the general public.” 

“Did they break your legs so you couldn’t escape?” Roger asked. 

“What?” Toni said. “No. I don’t-- I can’t escape from anyone! I belong to me! Just like you belong to you!”

Roger’s face implied that he thought Toni was very stupid and he was not looking forward to being on the same team as her. 

“Yeah,” Rumlow said. “He’s like that all the time. It’s best to just go with it, in my experience.” 

“You’re not actually keeping him prisoner?” Toni said. 

“Well, yeah, we kind of are,” Rumlow said, “if he stays out of cryo for a month he starts killing people. We used to try to convince him that he was a person who doesn’t have to obey us, but he’d spend the whole time paranoid that we were lying to him for some reason, and we’d be barely making progress when we had to wipe him again. If we work with his beliefs, he’s much happier.” 

Roger snorted. Toni assumed that meant “great, you’re lying to her by claiming that you’re lying to me.” 

At that moment Toni made one of the most important snap decisions of her life. “He’s coming home with me.”


	6. Chapter 6

The AWI did not protest too hard about Toni taking Roger home with her, particularly after Toni pointed out that if they were going to be on the team they would have to train together, and the more time she spent in the AWI’s secret lairs the more likely it was that Rumlow would zone out and miss her finding out all their confidential information. 

“We’re not trying to keep you from discovering any confidential information,” Rumlow had said. 

“You know, I was all flattered when you invited me to your superhero team,” Toni said, “and then I discovered that you think I’m a complete fucking moron.”

And once he had been dropped off at Stark Towers, with instructions that in two weeks they’d return to put him in cryosleep again, Project Winter Soldier began in earnest.

\--

“What do you like?” Toni asked. “I know your memories are wiped, I’m not asking you for memories of fun times you’ve had, but you still have your procedural memory and your semantic memory, right? You know what the capital of Cuba is--”

“Havana,” Roger answered promptly.

 

“And you know how to shoot a gun.”

“My semantic memory is slow, possibly as a side effect of the memory wipes. I forget faster and take longer to learn. However, my procedural memory is sharper than baseline humans,” Roger said, as if reciting from a manual. “I can be shown something once and reproduce it near-perfectly decades later.”

“Wait,” Toni said. “Decades?” He looked like an attractive man in his early thirties. Young enough that if she’d decided to take advantage Toni would have been robbing the cradle. “How old are you?”

“Classified,” Roger responded. 

Fair enough. And besides the point, regardless. “Anyway, preferences are part of semantic memory. What do you like?”

Roger thought about this. He seemed to be confused about Toni’s status: on one hand, she was on the AWI’s team with him, which implied she was also an asset; on the other hand, she talked like she was in charge. Toni wondered what he’d think when he met Pepper. Probably that Pepper was her handler, and Toni was a tremendously disrespectful asset. Well, that wasn’t far wrong. 

Finally, he said, “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?” Toni asked.

“I do what I’m told, or what will cause me to complete the mission within parameters,” Roger said. “I do not-- prefer one thing to another, except when told.”

“You have to have liked--” Toni shook her head. “Of course you don’t know. Your semantic memory is slow. If you try something and you liked it you’re not going to remember it to try again.” She frowned. “Did nobody at the AWI even try to figure out what you enjoy?”

“I’m an asset,” Roger said. “I give other people what they want. They don’t give me what I want.”

Christ. It had been the obvious thing to do to Toni. But then-- as Pepper continually pointed out to her-- Toni was a certified genius, and she couldn’t expect her brilliance of lesser people. Admittedly, her brilliance generally applied to building really awesome bombs, and not to social skills, but if there was one thing Toni had learned in the past four decades, it was that she could never predict what shit other people would be bad at. 

Work with him, Toni could hear Rumlow’s voice saying. Don’t try to disprove his delusions, just use them to get him to do what would make him happiest. “Okay,” Toni said, “so, first things first, if something makes you feel-- sad or angry or gross inside-- you are under orders to refuse it.”

Roger considered this. “I don’t know what those feel like.”

Toni would have thwacked her head into the wall if she wasn’t concerned about keeping all of her precious IQ points. 

“I’ll book a therapist with a specialty in complex post traumatic stress disorder,” Jarvis said. 

“Find one with a daily opening in her schedule,” Toni said, “and a willingness to sign a lot of non-disclosure agreements.”

\--

“You like WHAT?” Toni said. 

“I believe,” Jarvis said, “you intended him to express his own preferences about food in a judgment-free environment.”

Toni had delegated Pepper to call every restaurant, deli, coffee shop, and miscellaneous food-producing entity in a five-block radius and tell them to deliver to Stark Tower their most popular dish. (Most of them didn’t do delivery. Fortunately, one of the reasons that Toni had hired Pepper is that she was very good at solving this sort of problem.) Now, Roger was sampling fried rice, croissants, shwarma-- all the best that Manhattan had to offer. 

And somehow he had settled on grilled cheese. Now, Toni wouldn’t have had any objection to this if it were normal grilled cheese, made of the sort of cheese that came in individual plastic-wrapped slices. But this was gourmet grilled cheese. The cheese was not just mozzarella but also ricotta and brie, coming from cows treated better than the average Stark Industries intern. It was flavored with truffle salt. There were some things that Toni believed in as an American, and one of them was that grilled cheese was not supposed to contain figs and honey. 

“It’s good,” Roger mumbled around his half-chewed mouthful of sourdough and walnuts. He swallowed and froze, his eyes wide. Toni recognized that face. That was the face of someone expecting to be beaten. 

Crap, crap, crap. “I was, uh, surprised,” Toni said. “Grilled cheese is great! Wonderful! An excellent choice! The important thing is that you have followed my orders to express your opinions about which food you genuinely enjoy so that we can make sure to give it to you more often. Uh. Would you like a drink?”

After sipping a dozen drinks, Roger pronounced that his favorite was the overpriced coffee from a hippie coffeeshop that proudly announced “OUR COFFEE GUARANTEED MOLD-FREE”. (Toni personally felt this came from the “contains no asbestos” school of food labeling.) Toni had picked up the habit of guzzling gallons of bad black coffee in undergrad, and at this point her morning brew could probably be used to remove rust from cars. 

Her face, Toni felt, ought to have given her an Oscar. 

\--

“You know I wouldn’t miss the Yinsen Foundation meeting unless it was something really important,” Toni said. 

Pepper lifted an eyebrow. “Titanic?”

“Roger hasn’t seen it yet,” Toni said defensively. 

Figuring out Roger’s taste in movies had involved a couple of false starts. Toni’d started with action movies, because if there was one thing she knew about Roger it was that his hobby was killing things. Unfortunately, he spent the whole time critiquing everyone’s fighting technique (“Kick him! He’s ridiculously off-balance, one good kick and he’s-- AAAAARGH!”). Toni had noticed him getting unusually quiet and invested at the end of Speed, letting nearly four poor decisions pass by unnoticed, and had pivoted into romances. It turned out that Roger liked nothing more than a good weepie-- the more tear-jerking the better. 

“If he hasn’t seen it in the past twenty years,” Pepper said, “I’m pretty sure it can wait another two hours.”

“Can’t do it,” Toni said, “it would throw us entirely off schedule. I’m planning on getting through Love Actually, The Notebook, and Pretty Woman tonight.”

Pepper frowned. “You haven’t been to the last two board meetings.”

“Those were important too!” Toni said. 

“As I recall, they were taking Roger to the Met,” Pepper said, “and figuring out what Roger’s favorite metal band is.”

“Come on, Pep,” Toni said, “I trust you, I know you can get the Yinsen Foundation to do the right things without me, you don’t need me standing over your shoulder micromanaging you. I’ll be at the next one. Promise.”

Pepper made a skeptical noise and left. Toni felt very injured. She had done absolutely nothing to make Pepper be skeptical of her attending any more meetings. She had never been anything but reliable and willing to attend those meetings, no matter how goddamn boring they were. 

\--

“I can fly,” Toni said.

“I thought,” Roger said, “you’ve been able to fly this whole time. You told Rumlow that.”

Toni waved a hand dismissively. “That’s hovering. Let me show you.” She frowned. “Wait, I can’t show you.”

“What?” Roger said. 

“Well, I mean, I can stand on the roof of Stark Tower and go really high up into the air,” Toni said. “But that’s not very visually impressive. I’d just be a speck. For all you knew I could be at that te-- adorable little coffee shop you like. No.” Toni nodded, the face of sudden determination. “I’ll carry you.”

Roger appeared significantly less enthusiastic than Toni was. “You’re going to drop me.”.

“If I do,” Toni said, “we’ll either be low enough that you’ll survive, or high enough that I can catch you.”

“That’s very reassuring,” Roger said.

“Irony,” Toni said. “We should tell your therapist, you’re making progress.”

“For all you know, I’ve been ironic this whole time,” Roger said. “They say murder is the height of hipsterism.” He shook his head. “Man, next time I have to get someone to teach me how to be a person, I’m getting someone less snarky.”

“I hate to inform you,” Toni said, “but the snark was inside you all along.”

“Take me,” Roger said. 

It took Toni a moment to realize what he was referring to. Roger’s face was flat. It didn’t look like his usual someone-might-hurt-me face, which vaguely resembled a cross between a Brit with a stiff upper lip and a kicked puppy, but-- “Remember your most important order,” Toni said, “you have to say ‘no’ if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t forget orders,” Roger said. 

In a few moments, Toni had transferred from her wheelchair to her suit, and they were on the Stark Tower roof. It was late, perhaps midnight; the shadows played across Roger’s skin in a tremendously interesting manner, one that probably ought to be immortalized in artwork. 

“So,” Toni said, her chest unaccountably tight. A second later the words came out of her suit: tinny, synthesized. 

“How are we going to do this?”

“I don’t know,” Toni said, “I’ve never done this before.”

“I’m sure you say that to all the girls,” Roger said, getting up close to Toni so she could grab him in her armored arms. Her heart was racing. She grabbed him securely, wishing she’d thought ahead to have some sort of seatbelt, and thought very firmly:

 _fly_.

Toni never got used to flying. Walking had become slow and laborious; rolling her wheelchair was as thoughtless as pacing once had been; even hovering had become routine; but flying always felt like the moment you moved one gear one crucial millimeter and then the machine worked. Which it was, Toni guessed, because she was making gravity her bitch. She moved up; the Stark Tower roof retreated away from her until it looked as though she was seeing it from an airplane that had just taken off. Roger tensed in her arms then, as it became obvious that despite her fears Toni was really not going to drop him, relaxed. 

Toni sang, “Let me show you the world.” Her already perpetually off-key voice was not improved by Jarvis’s synthesizing ability. 

“What are you singing?” Roger asked.

“Remind me to show you Disney,” Toni said. 

“You won’t be able to,” Roger said. “I go back tomorrow.”

Toni quieted. She became very, very still.

“You forgot, didn’t you?”

“Let me show you something,” she said, and began to push herself, higher, higher, high enough that Jarvis ought to have said something if he wasn’t giving Roger and her their privacy. 

“This,” she said, “is New York.”

The vendors on the street hawked pictures of New York City at night to distracted tourists; they were as cliche as a I <3 NY T-shirt, and as a lifelong New Yorker Toni was hardly going to gape at them, any more than she would at the Statue of Liberty. But there was a feeling, of seeing for the first time the real version something made dull by imitations, a sense of recognition, of the familiar made new, understanding “oh! That was what you were supposed to be, this whole time.”

For one thing, New York City was big; even from a height where the buildings would have been blurry and indistinct, it stretched out as far as the eye could see. It looked almost like a computer chip (magnified immensely, or as large as the computer in a fifties science fiction novel): the bright straight lines of the grid, connecting the thousands if not millions of dots shining in the night. The only dark spot was the harbor, jutting in; but even it had its points of light, from sailors and ships. New York City gleamed, it light up the night. Toni would have been tempted to say something like “it was as if the light was fighting a war against the darkness and winning”, but that wasn’t how it was; the light shone carelessly, for other purposes, and it still overcame the darkness. Not everywhere, of course, not yet. But here. 

Roger’s breath hitched in his throat. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “It looks like-- like stars.” Toni could see it. A constellation below to match the constellation above. 

“Stars are just hydrogen exploding,” Toni said. “They’re big and hot and far away. Not that impressive. Every one of those lights is a person, a little life. This used to be wilderness. Nothing but trees and Indians. And then a bunch of fur traders settled here, and around them grew streets and banks and merchants until it was a real city. We built this, out of wood and then out of steel, because we wanted to, and because we could.” She shook her head, remembering something her dad used to say. “God scrambled the languages of Earth because they tried to build a tower that touched the sky, and now a thousand people speaking a thousand languages walk by Stark Tower each day, and none of them ever bother to look up.”

Roger was quiet for a long while. “Better than stars.”

“I knew you would like it,” Toni said.

“It’s not so bad, being mind-wiped,” Roger said. “Because… I’ll get to see this again, for the first time.”

\--

“Is your plan to stay drunk for the entire two weeks that Roger is gone?” Pepper asked.

Toni looked up blearily from the workshop floor, which was particularly impressive, because she’d definitely gotten drunk in her chair. She had a pounding headache. Her mouth tasted like shit warmed over. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a shower. 

“No,” Toni said, “my plan is to stay passed out for the entire two weeks that Roger is gone. The drinking is just a necessary preliminary.”

Pepper made a sort of huffing noise.

Toni had definitely had whiskey. She distinctly recalled that there had been whiskey before she had passed out, and now there was no whiskey to be seen. She craned her head to get a good look at Pepper. “Even a genius can’t work without her equipment,” Toni said.

“I am not going to let you be drunk or passed out for two weeks,” Pepper said, continuing to hold the whiskey well out of reach. 

“Don’t you work for me?” Toni asked. “Since when do you have the right to say whether I can be passed out for two weeks or not?”

“Since it has been shown that you are utterly incompetent at handling it,” Pepper said. “I don’t know why Roger leaving upsets you so much--”

“May I interrupt, Ms. Potts?” Jarvis said in his typical smooth tone.

“Go ahead.”

“I believe,” Jarvis said, “you may understand Dr. Stark’s current state much more clearly if you know that she is in love.”

Toni would have glared at Jarvis if Jarvis had a location, instead of being present in the entirety of the Internet. Instead, Toni chose to glare at the ceiling, which had the advantage that her head wanted to be located on the floor anyway. “I am not,” Toni said. “I do not fall in love. I am the stony-hearted Toni Stark, who loves only computers and engines and circuits and things of that nature, and who uses men for my pleasure and then tosses them aside--”

“What about Colonel Rhodes?” Jarvis asked.

“An aberration,” Toni said, “and a mistake.” The ceiling seemed to be moving. Toni felt this was not very cooperative of it. “Besides, I did toss him aside eventually.”

“I believe, Dr. Stark,” Jarvis said, “he ended the relationship, and you ended up sobbing on the floor begging him not to leave.”

“Semantics.”

Jarvis played back a flawless recording of Toni’s voice. ”Christ, what do you want from me? I’ll do anything. I’ll have a kid, I’ll buy you Central Park, I’ll-- I’ll fucking get married if I have to.”

“You’re enjoying this,” Toni said. “Sadist.”

“I am a computer,” Jarvis said, “I do not experience emotions.”

“Yes, you do,” Toni said, her head throbbing, “I programmed your utility function myself.”

“Well,” Jarvis said, “perhaps the child takes after the parent.”

Pepper was laughing. Toni moaned, “I am surrounded by traitors on every side.” 

Pepper walked over next to Toni and helped her into her wheelchair. “It’s okay,” she said, her voice full of compassion and hardly any sarcasm. “But you really can’t drink for two weeks straight. Work on your suit, or that new line of consumer products Stark Industries is putting out. Put in a couple of eighteen-hour days and he’ll be here before you know it.”

“You know my coping mechanisms,” Toni said, stretching a little bit in her chair. “Hair of the dog?” Toni asked hopefully.

“No,” Pepper said, continuing to hold the whiskey bottle well out of reach. “You earned this hangover, and now you have to suffer through it.”

“Okay, but no more meetings,” Toni said, “I can’t suffer through love and Obie at the same time. I’ll still be involved, just-- give me summaries or something, I don’t know.” Toni felt vaguely guilty, like she could imagine Yinsen’s ghost glaring at her, but Ghost Of Yinsen had been married for decades and decades and therefore did not get to have an opinion. 

“No meetings,” Pepper agreed.

\--

“Hi,” Toni said. “I’m Toni. You’re Roger.”

“Hi,” Roger said. “Roger. I like that name.” 

Toni pressed a grilled cheese into his hands. “This is for you.”

Roger took a bite. His eyes widened. “That’s good.”

Toni smiled. “I know.”


	7. Chapter 7

“I can’t believe,” Toni complained, “I’m at a meeting.”

She tried to make a “can you believe this shit” face at Roger. Unfortunately, Roger was just four days out of cryo, and his irony hadn’t grown back in yet. So he stared at her stony-faced.

“Not only that,” Toni said, “but I’m at a meeting with Powerpoint. Why would you bother to make a Powerpoint? There are only three people here!”

“While I was in corporate sabotage,” Rumlow said, “some of it rubbed off. Are you ready to begin, or would you like to complain a bit more first?”

Toni slumped back into her chair. One advantage of being in a wheelchair, Toni thought: you never had to sit in those uncomfortable-ass (indeed, literally uncomfortable ass) conference chairs. Although, to be fair, this meeting was happening in Stark Tower and she could just buy comfortable leather chairs if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to, because fuck Rumlow. So there you are. 

Rumlow clicked from the title slide, which had some little black lines Toni was 99% certain were letters on it, to the second slide, which had different incomprehensible black lines and a picture of a man who would be quite attractive if he didn’t give off the air of being continually followed around by his own personal rain cloud.

“Dr. Bruce Banner was one of the world’s leading physicists,” Rumlow said, “when a lab accident while researching gamma radiation triggered a genetic abnormality believed to be a product of a supersoldier program led by his father. The combination essentially supercharges the normal flight-or-fight reflex. When Dr. Banner becomes frightened, aroused or-- most famously-- angry--”

Rumlow clicked to the next slide. Toni was vaguely curious if they’d go the “artist’s reconstruction” or the “blurry still from a security camera” route; judging by the high quality of the picture, they went with the former. “He transforms into the Hulk. The Hulk is invulnerable to everything short of a nuclear explosion, strong enough to punch through a building, and completely unable to be reasoned with.”

Click. Map of the world, with pins in various locations, and some more incomprehensible black lines on it. “Doctor Banner has chosen to hide himself away from people to avoid potential Hulk triggers. In the past, the Army has attempted to capture Doctor Banner, allegedly to keep him in protective custody, but most observers believe that they want to study the abnormality in the hopes of recreating it in a more manageable form.”

Toni cringed. Her inventions had been bad enough; imagine an entire army of Hulks. She somehow imagined that “more manageable” didn’t mean transforming them into pacifists. 

“In recent years, all interested parties have agreed to let Dr. Banner alone, because so far attempts to capture Dr. Banner have been the single most reliable trigger of Hulk. However, our intelligence has revealed that an organization is planning to break this disagreement.” 

He clicked to the next slide, and Toni figured this had gone on quite long enough. “You know that fifty percent of the people you’re giving this talk to can’t read, right?”

Rumlow blinked, startled. “Really?”

Toni considered. “I guess I don’t know it’s fifty percent. Roger?”

“I can read fine,” Roger said with the air of someone who was giving a status report on a mission-critical machine. 

“And I can handle diagrams just fine,” Toni said helpfully. “Or numbers. It’s that whole little-picture-to-sound thing I can’t do.” 

“Are you telling me one of the biggest geniuses of the twenty-first century can’t read?”

“Did you hear that?” Toni said to Roger. “He called me a genius. I don’t hear that nearly enough.”

“Didn’t you literally win a MacArthur genius fellowship?” Roger said. 

Toni grinned. “Your snark’s coming back! I’m so proud.” 

Roger’s face was flat. Toni was pretty sure that meant “I was making a completely factual comment based on my extensive knowledge of my teammate and am not entirely sure what this ‘snark’ thing is”, but perhaps he was just developing his skill as a deadpan comedian! If there was one thing Toni was known for it was her optimism. 

Rumlow cleared his throat. “Advanced Idea Mechanics is a think tank which specializes in cutting-edge weaponry.” The slide showed a picture of a smiling square-jawed man in a perfect suit. Toni hated him already. “They are noted for having absolutely no ideological bent whatsoever-- they’re as happy to sell weapons to the United States, Iran, Russia, the Ten Rings, or an eccentric billionaire. We believe that one of the primary reasons the world hasn’t been destroyed yet is that AIM--” 

Toni interrupted. “They have initials!”

Rumlow was apparently running out of hope about getting through this meeting without any running commentary from the cheap seats. “...yes?”

“They’re not quite as secret as you, then,” Toni said. 

“I assure you,” Rumlow said, with an air of infinite patience covering infinite frustration, “we are absolutely the most secret of any of the secret organizations you have ever been approached to work for. As I was saying, AIM is willing to accept protection money to not sell its host of weapons to anyone. As one of the groups of people that has to pay AIM protection money, we have an obvious interest in making sure they don’t figure out how to make Hulks. And if someone doesn’t pay up enough for AIM to be satisfied… I do not exaggerate when I say this is potentially an extinction-level event.”

Click. This slide was all incomprehensible black lines. “Our goal in this mission is twofold. First, you are to extract Dr. Banner before AIM can capture him and preferably before they even notice he’s gone. Second, you are to prevent Dr. Banner from going Hulk through all means necessary. In the event he goes Hulk, you are to draw him away from population centers in order to minimize civilian casualties. However, your first priority is to make sure AIM doesn’t get him. If ten thousand people have to die to make this be the case, then this is a sacrifice we must be willing to make. Am I understood?”

“Crystal,” Toni said.

“Affirmative,” Roger said.

“Our intelligence suggests that AIM intends to capture him next week,” Rumlow said. “You have 24 hours for last-minute preparations. And may God be with you both.”

\--

Toni caught up with Roger as they left; Rumlow was walking discreetly behind her, not crowding her, but also making it abundantly clear that he wasn’t going anywhere she didn’t approve of. Toni liked that. It was courteous. “Want to get ready together?” she asked Roger.

“Inter-unit fraternization is not encouraged,” Roger said with the voice of finality.

“I fraternized with you all the time before you got wiped,” Toni said. 

“Previous violations of regulations do not make current violations of regulations less objectionable,” Roger said. 

“We can get dinner together. Indian. You like Indian. Watch a movie. Relax a bit.” Toni’s voice sounded wheedling even to herself, and she hated it. 

“The Winter Soldier unit is efficient because unlike conventional soldiers it doesn’t require R&R,” Roger said informatively. 

“You’re not a unit, you’re a person, and-- you’re talking like you’re a computer manual and-- it doesn’t matter whether you require R&R or not, people-- people don’t have to justify having fun because it’ll make them better at their job!” Toni said. 

“Has our handler approved of your conversation with me?” Roger asked. 

Work with the delusions, she thought. 

“I miss you,” Toni said. “And if I keep missing you, it will impair operational effectiveness. Therefore, to maximize our chance of a successful operation, we should get dinner tonight. Rumlow, am I right?” She turned over her shoulder-- which kind of gave her a crick in her neck, goddamn, being crippled was annoying-- and shot a glare at Rumlow which said: if you do not agree with me on this point operational effectiveness will be impaired by the fact that your organs are adorning Stark Tower’s walls as a warning to my enemies.

“Yep, yep,” Rumlow said, “if we want Toni Stark operating at peak efficiency, you’re absolutely going to have to go to dinner with her. No other option. Order from your handler.”

Roger nodded, a sharp upward gesture, acknowledging a new sub-mission which he would complete with the same grim determination that he used to complete every other mission. Toni would take what she could get. 

\--

Toni wasn’t scared. 

You see, if Toni were scared, then she would have to think about things. She’d have to think about whether she was really doing the right thing, and about whether she was willing to (take a life) deal with the fact that she couldn’t save everyone, and about the fact that as good as her armor was she hadn’t made anything that could stand up to Hulk and she wasn’t sure she ever could, and about the hundreds of soldiers who had died last time someone had tried to attack the Hulk, and about how they were facing him with literally two people, and about how Toni could deal with herself dying pretty well but if Roger died she didn’t know what she’d do, even though if you think about it Roger is dying every two weeks, which is a whole other set of things Toni didn’t like thinking about. And the last thing Toni wanted to do was to think about all that. So she wasn’t scared.

She was just making last-minute improvements on the suit. That was all.

She missed pacing. It was the worst part of being a cripple. You can’t think while rolling. 

Toni couldn’t even drink. It would impair operational effectiveness, to use the phrase she’d used with Roger. She just ran every test she could think of and watched them pass and did them again, and again, just to be safe. 

What if it broke? What if something didn’t work and someone died and it was entirely her fault? It used to be that the only thing that rode on her engineering was her pride, which was bad enough, and now lives were at stake. Well, lives were always at stake, but now she knew they were at stake, and the tests passed and passed and she wished for a bug just so she could fix it and feel like she was doing something. 

“You should rest,” Jarvis said, not unkindly.

“I’ll sleep on the plane,” Toni said, “it’s what I got the giant fuckoff plane for.”

The Starks were theoretically Jewish, but Howard Stark had learned over his life that if you were Jewish people would (a) refuse to buy things from your company and (b) occasionally throw you in camps and murder your entire family. Toni wasn’t actually sure which one her father disapproved of more. Regardless, she had grown up with Christmas trees and bacon cheeseburgers and never thought about it much.

Toni pressed her face into the suit and whispered so Jarvis wouldn’t hear, because if he heard her doing this it would be blackmail material for a month. 

“Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elo-- uh, elo-- I think there’s another adonai in there somewhere. Fuck,” Toni said. “Look, I’m not good at this, just… please don’t let Roger die. Um. Do you even pay attention to prayers to help non-Jews? I mean, I guess he might be Jewish? He kind of has memory problems, makes figuring out his ancestry a bit hard. Anyway. Shema something something, don’t let Roger die, don’t let me die. Please.” 

“I can hear you,” Jarvis said.

“Fuck off.”

Toni figured that she’d probably discharged her religious duties for the next year at this point and went back to what she was good at: engineering.

She ran the tests. The tests passed. Toni didn’t feel scared. She had never felt less scared in her life. 

\--

Waking up wonderfully refreshed after a lovely eight-hour sleep, Toni was glad she’d invested in the giant plane with a king-size bed. Admittedly, this was probably the first time she’d actually used it to sleep in, but she was pretty sure that preventing even one instance of a sleep-deprived Toni trying to capture Hulk meant that her plane was net positive for the world. It was practically charity. Of course, she might not have been sleep-deprived if she’d gotten enough sleep last night, but to be honest Toni sleeping an ordinary schedule was so completely unreasonable even Pepper had stopped nagging her about it. 

Although it was annoying that Roger had decided to sleep on the floor instead of in the bed with her. How was she supposed to win his heart if he forgot everything every two weeks?

Meh. Probably all for the better, anyway. Dating was a waste of time. And what did Jarvis know about love anyway? He was a robot. Toni had seen enough movies to know that he wasn’t going to know shit about love until he had some kind of heartwarming moment where he discovered what life was really, truly, all about, and she knew that Jarvis would never stand for that nonsense. 

She transferred to her wheelchair and rolled over to where Rumlow was cleaning his guns. “You know, you’re not actually going to be involved in this mission,” she said helpfully. “Your guns don’t have to be clean. It doesn’t matter if they can’t fire anything at all.”

“Pre-mission jitters,” Rumlow said. “Some people knit, some people chain-smoke, I clean my guns.”

“Nobody knits,” Toni said. “You guys are all big tough superspies, you don’t knit.”

“You’d be surprised,” Rumlow said, his hands working without a wasted movement. “This one lady keeps trying to give us all gun cozies.”

“I fixed up my suit,” Toni offered, “but it’s kind of hard to repair the suit without having a lab to fix it in. Guns are easier.”

“It’s your plane,” Rumlow said, “why can’t you just put the lab in the plane?”

“What do you have to be jittery about?” Toni said. “You’re the one person here who isn’t going to be smashed by an enormous green ragemonster.”

“I called in a lot of favors for the Ultimates Initiative to be created,” Rumlow said. “Blew a lot of capital among my employers. If you guys fuck this up--”

“You’ll be out of a job?”

“Worse. I’ll be on stakeout duty for the rest of my life.” Rumlow sighed. “Twelve hours a day of sitting in a car with a pot of coffee writing down who enters and leaves a building. Glorified security camera. I’d rather take unemployment.” 

“You could quit,” Toni suggested.

“You can’t quit,” Rumlow said. “I mean, you can quit. You’re more like an independent contractor. But once you’re really in AWI, you’re in for life.”

Toni gloated. “Ha! I knew you would pick up my word.”

“It’s useful,” Rumlow admitted. “Otherwise you’re stuck going ‘us’ and ‘the organization’ the whole time, and then you sound like a mysterious cryptic bastard who isn’t even any good at it.” Rumlow’s tone left no doubt which of those he found most offensive.

“So, Rumlow,” Toni said, “we’re working together, let’s get to know each other a bit. What do you do for fun when you’re not running around flexing your muscles and making completely useless Powerpoints?”

“What do you do for fun when you’re not running around showing my agents romantic comedies and bothering me when I’m trying to get my head together?” Rumlow countered.

“I’ve slept with every People Sexiest Man Alive since 1995,” Toni said.

“That’s not fun,” Rumlow said, “that’s sex addiction.”

“Six of one, half dozen of the other…”

“No, you and me, we’re not fun people,” Rumlow said. “We don’t have hobbies. We don’t like doing things unless they matter. What I do for fun is I work.”

“I think that is what my therapist would call ‘lack of balance,’” Toni said, making air quotes.

“She seems quite insightful,” Rumlow said. 

“I fired her after two sessions.”

“Ah.”

Toni watched him reassemble his gun. It was soothing. And she’d already noticed half-a-dozen improvements she could do once she got back to the lab. Of course, she couldn’t sell them to anybody, so it wasn’t like there was much of a point. But good engineering was its own reward.

After a while, Rumlow said, “I don’t like killing people.”

“Oh?”

“That’s why I do Powerpoints, I think,” Rumlow said. “White-collar drones escape by playing first-person shooters, pretending to be me. I escape by pretending to be them.” He shook his head. “I used to keep track of how many people I’d killed. I used to run their names through my head at night and promise them that I would make their deaths mean something, that-- I didn’t kill them for nothing.” He stared at the half-assembled gun in his hands. “I can’t do that anymore. I lost count.”

“I calculated how many deaths I caused once,” Toni said, “because my weapons killed people that a worse weapon would have just maimed or missed entirely.” Her voice was quiet. “Hundreds. Thousands.”

“You didn’t pull the trigger,” Rumlow said.

“I don’t think it makes a difference to them.”

Rumlow acknowledged the point with a tilt of his head. His gun clean, he mechanically started the process again, without paying much attention. 

The pressure of the potential improvements had built up until Toni was at her breaking point. “Ugh, that’s a terrible design,” Toni said, “when we get back, you throw that in the trash and I’ll make you a much better one. Half the weight, practically aims itself.” 

“I was having a moment,” Rumlow said. “Bonding. Intimacy.”

“I don’t do bonding,” Toni said, “and I certainly don’t do intimacy. Ask anyone. If you want whiskey recommendations or robots, I’m your girl. If you want feelings, talk to somebody else.” 

“I don’t know,” Rumlow said, “I feel like at the culmination of everything you’ve worked for it’s an opportunity to… reflect on your life. Where you’ve been, where you’re going, whether you’re okay with what’s happened.”

“Never done that,” Toni said. “Never been much reason to. ‘At this culmination of everything I’ve worked for, I’ve made this thing that used to do a little boom now do a big boom.’”

“Says the person who completely turned around her company,” Rumlow said, “because she realized it was killing people.”

“Well, yeah,” Toni said. “And let me tell you, this entire experience has put me off ever doing self-reflection again. Suddenly you have to hang around with whiny emo bodybuilders who won’t stop fiddling with their guns.”

“Charming,” Rumlow said, “entirely charming, I feel so confident having the fate of the world and, more importantly, my career, in your hands.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it's been a long time between updates! Sorry, guys, there was Christmas, then a friend visited, and then I got top surgery. :) 
> 
> Thanks to Shea Levy and Nonternary for information about how to make Toni Stark the Worst Jew.


	8. Chapter 8

“Dr. Banner!” Toni said. “I love your work! Especially the part where you turn into a giant green rage monster and smash downtown.”

Dr. Banner looked at Toni, hovering six inches above the ground. He looked at the roof. “You just crashed through my ceiling,” he said mildly.

“Or you could think of it as me making a skylight,” Toni said. “Really, it’s a shame that you’re going to stay here long enough to really appreciate it.” She reached out a metal-encased hand for him to shake. “I’m Toni Stark. Of Stark Industries.”

He did not take it. “Look,” Dr. Banner said wearily. “Every time this happens, I turn into the other guy, I kill a dozen or hundred or a thousand people, I escape into the wilderness, and you are like ‘curses! Foiled again!’ You seem like a nice lady, I don’t want to kill you, and I really don’t want to add more dead civilians to my already overburdened conscience. So how about we just skip ahead to the part where I’ve escaped into the wilderness and avoid the mass murder?”

“I think you’re mistaken about what this is about,” Toni said.

“I’m mistaken about why the CEO of the greatest weapons manufacturing company in the entire world is visiting the greatest weapon in the entire world?” Dr. Banner asked. “Perhaps this is a social call?”

She knew she wasn’t supposed to, but Toni inwardly preened. Greatest weapons manufacturing company in the world. Beat that, Hammer Industries. Even when she was evil she was the best. 

“Yeah,” Toni said, “I don’t know if you’ve heard the news, but I changed. Got kidnapped in Afghanistan, saw all the harm my work was causing, decided to turn over a new leaf and become a good guy. Also, I have an awesome new suit. It’s nifty, isn’t it?”

Toni scooted back and forth a bit, showing off how nicely her suit flew. She would have set off one of her missiles, but that probably would make it a bit unconvincing when she claimed to be a good guy.

Bruce did not seem particularly willing to offer an opinion on the suit’s niftiness. “And that’s why you’ve decided to crash your way through my roof?”

“An organization called AIM wants to kidnap you and make a whole bunch of other Hulks,” Toni said. “I’m here to rescue you, because I might be trying to be a good person now, but I’m still pretty lazy and to be honest a dozen other Hulks seems like it would cut seriously into my vacation time.”

Dr. Banner lifted an eyebrow.

“Laziness is one of the cardinal virtues of the engineer, you know,” Toni said. 

“Well, that’s a new one,” Dr. Banner said, “no one’s tried to kidnap me before by claiming that they’re rescuing me from other kidnappers. It’s clever, I must admit that.”

“I’m not kidnapping you,” Toni said. “You can do whatever you want once we’ve rescued you, including”-- Toni looked around-- “living in a tiny hovel that is worse than Afghanistan, Jesus Christ, one of these days I’m going to have to start Architects Without Borders for the sake of my own sanity if nothing else--”

“Forgive me if I’m skeptical of your good intent,” Dr. Banner said. He, if anything, looked less convinced than he had been starting out. And when your baseline was ‘I just made you an awesome new nonconsensual skylight!’, that was saying something. 

Toni switched her suit from external audio to internal audio. “Rumlow, what the fuck were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that you and Winter Soldier are the only two people in my organization who could remotely handle Hulk,” Rumlow said, “and I like my negotiators. I like them in their current, not-beaten-into-a-pulp form.”

“Well, maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about him becoming Hulk if you didn’t decide to put your two most obnoxious supersoldiers on the case,” Toni said. 

“If it helps, you’re also my two least obnoxious supersoldiers,” Rumlow said. 

“It really doesn’t.”

“Worth a shot,” Rumlow said. “He’s turned into Hulk every other time an intelligence organization has contacted him. I very much doubt it’ll be different this time.”

“How the hell am I supposed to persuade him?” Toni said. “I’ve never persuaded anyone of anything! That’s Pepper’s job!”

“You have a certain charm,” Rumlow said, “a sort of brash, ballsy, ‘I’ll do whatever I want and you can’t help but like me for it’ thing.”

“And so far it’s been a great help,” Toni said. 

“Have you considered annoying him until he lets you rescue him in self-defense?” Rumlow asked. 

Dr. Banner was eyeing the suddenly silent Toni curiously. 

“Sorry,” Toni said, “I was talking to my handler, I was hoping he would have some advice about how to convince you of this thing-- which is true, by the way, we didn’t make it up-- but apparently his plan is for me to spontaneously acquire diplomacy skills.” Charm. Really. Toni was going to brashly charm him in the head. 

Dr. Banner said, “this is a very competent operation.”

“Is there any information I could provide that would convince you?” Toni said. 

“No.”

“I could show you news stories about how Stark Industries isn’t making weapons anymore,” Toni said. “I could tell you all about how my foundation is helping prevent malaria in Africa. Bednets! It’s a thing.”

“I am not going to let you kidnap me regardless of your position on malaria,” Dr. Banner said. 

“Really?” Toni said. “I mean, come on, if I were pro-malaria you’d have to be at least a little less likely to let me kidnap you. Uh. I mean. Save you. Save you in a way one hundred percent respectful of your personal freedom and ability to choose to live in awful hovels.”

Roger chose that moment to walk inside the building. “You are in custody,” he said. “Please remain calm; it is not within mission parameters that you become the Hulk. We will not cause you harm if you follow our instructions.”

Toni facepalmed. Unfortunately, she misjudged the force of the facepalming and wound up pushing herself backwards nearly a foot. On the bright side, the suit’s self-stabilizers worked really well, and she was dignified again within moments.

“No kidnapping, huh?” Dr. Banner said.

“Okay, next person we get on this fucking team really is going to be charming and shit,” Toni said. “trying to get the two of us to do it is completely useless-- look, Dr. Banner, Roger is a former Soviet assassin, they fucked him frontwards, backwards, and sideways, I’m doing my best but it gets a bit hard because his memory keeps getting wiped when he’s in cryogenic suspension.”

Dr. Banner looked skeptical.

“Roger, you like Indian food, right?” Toni said. 

“The asset is not permitted food preferences as those cause inconvenience in feeding and may lead to breaking cover,” Roger said, “but as I am required to be fully honest to superiors, the consumption of Indian food provided pleasurable feelings.”

“See?” Toni said.

Dr. Banner looked even more skeptical.

“Look, if I was lying,” Toni said, “don’t you think I would have come up with a better lie than this? I am, like, a generally competent human being. I run my own company. If I were deliberately trying to deceive you, I would have left Roger at home.”

“So your argument is that you’re sufficiently incompetent at being persuasive when telling the truth, and sufficiently competent at lying,” Dr. Banner said, “that your obvious incompetence means you must be telling me the truth?”

Well, when he put it like that, it sounded like an atrociously bad argument. 

Toni wished Rumlow had seen fit to bring a negotiator, smashable or not. 

“Even if you’re telling the truth,” Dr. Banner said, “isn’t it tremendously dubious to use him for missions? I doubt he’s capable of informed consent. In the best possible scenario, you’re not someone I trust with my freedom, much less the ability to possibly make more of me.”

“He’s miserable when he doesn’t do missions,” Toni said, “goes absolutely bonkers, and at a certain point you have to worry about his happiness and not just his autonomy, you know? There’s no point making a guy miserable so you don’t feel bad about making him do things. Especially when we can use him to save other people. Like I’m saving you right now!”

“I suppose,” Dr. Banner said. He did not look convinced.

“Look,” Toni said, “we have plenty of time to argue about the moral philosophy of how I’m treating Roger later. Right now, we need to get you out of here before someone kidnaps you.”

“Yes,” Dr. Banner said, “it would be a terrible shame if I were turned into an amnesiac assassin with what looks to be an extremely experimental metal arm.”

“No one could give you a metal arm,” Roger said helpfully, “because you would turn into the Hulk part of the way through.”

“That is a comfort,” Dr. Banner remarked.

There was a loud crack. Toni, Roger, and Dr. Banner all froze. Slowly, Toni turned to look at the opposite wall.

Wedged into the wall was a bullet. 

“...Do you believe me now?” Toni asked.

Dr. Banner blanched. “Yes, yes I do, let’s get out of here.”

Finally, they were making use of Toni’s skillset. “Roger, make yourself useful, incapacitate those shooters,” Toni said, “I’ll deal with the future Mr. Ragemonster over here.”

Roger nodded and loped out the door. Dr. Banner looked like he might be mildly nervous about what “dealing with him” meant, but that might have just been what his face looked like. Some people have resting bitch face. Dr. Banner had resting misery face. 

Either way, Toni grabbed him under the armpits and started to rise. She’d carried someone only once before, and she was suddenly acutely aware of her lack of practice. It was wonderfully motivating to know that if she dropped him he would freak and kill hundreds of people including maybe herself. A definite aid to not running out of grip strength. 

On the other hand, when she got out of here (if she got out of here), it would be nice to have an excuse to spend more time showing Roger New York City. And Pepper couldn’t even complain! It was work!

“Jarvis?” she said on internal audio.

“Ready,” Jarvis said. “Is it uncouth to admit that I’ve been looking forward to this?”

“Nah, I’ve been looking forward to it too,” she said. “Your first priority is not getting shot, second priority is not dropping Dr. Banner, third priority is stowing him safely on the airplane. Fly me mostly on autopilot, I want to concentrate on carrying Dr. Banner, and get the radar going. I’ve got a feeling that wasn’t their only bullet.”

“Got it,” Jarvis said. 

“Try to make my route something that makes me hard to predict,” Toni said, “but also fast, I want to get Dr. Banner to the plane as quickly as possible.”

“You do realize that those are contradictory,” Jarvis said. 

“I have complete faith in you.” She switched to external audio. “I have got to add some passenger capability on this thing.”

“Please don’t tell me we’re going to fly all the way to New York City like this,” Dr. Banner said. He was looking slightly green. Toni hoped that was from airsickness. 

“Nah, there’s a plane, we just have to get you to it.”

Something whizzed past her. Apparently it really wasn’t their only bullet.

Flying on autopilot was odd. Toni had come to think of the suit as her body: her arms were strangely metallic, her feet capable of flying, her hands literally capable of shooting missiles (although actually doing that would probably only make Project Get Dr. Banner To The Plane In One Piece worse). But when she was on autopilot, the suit moved of its own accord. She could override it, of course, by moving herself, and she did when she saw a bullet approaching on the radar. But it still felt strange. 

It was like being possessed, her limbs moving of their own accord. Or like the time Toni took too many weird drugs and it felt like she was floating above her actual body, her meat body, and watching it take actions. Or like a sudden sharp reminder that this metallic body she had built with her hands and her mind wasn’t her real body, her real body was crippled and useless to anyone including herself. 

On the other hand, flying autopilot did take a lot of the decisions out of her hands. She wasn’t really sure what she would do if she had to think about where the plane was and where the bullets were and not dropping Dr. Banner and what was happening to Roger down there--

All she had to do was dodge. All she had to do was dodge while flying through the air and holding a man who, if she ever let him slip the least little tiny bit, would turn into an invulnerable monster who could hit her with a literal skyscraper. Easy-peasy. Practically a video game.

“If it turns out that they were trying to rescue me from you,” Dr. Banner said, “I will be acutely embarrassed.”

“If that happens I swear to God I will let you turn into the other guy,” Toni said, gritting her teeth, “and smash my head into bits.”

A bullet barely grazed her shoulder; the suit shuddered slightly off course, then corrected. Toni’s heart beat fast. She could almost feel the pain in her upper arm. “Shit,” she said. “Jarvis, diagnostics?”

“Cosmetic damage to the armor,” he said, “nothing vital. I can send a fuller report to you if you desire.”

“Kind of”-- Toni twisted to avoid another bullet-- “busy, I’ll take your word for it.”

Good. The primary harm was to her confidence (which probably needed the deflating anyway) and to Bruce’s pulse rate. She wished she’d managed to clap some kind of monitor on him. She wanted to know how much she could push it before someone went green. 

“I don’t mean to pry,” Dr. Banner said, “but if you are trying to keep us from being shot I would suggest perhaps avoiding more of the bullets.”

“Maybe you want to get in the suit,” Toni said, “and I can make snotty remarks.”

“That does seem closer to our core competencies.”

A bullet came close to them; Dr. Banner flinched. 

“Stop wiggling!” Toni said, “I’m going to drop you!”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been carried by a person in a robot suit while bullets are flying at you,” Dr. Banner said, “but it’s not exactly a comfortable experience.”

“How are you feeling?” Toni asked. 

“I am taking slow, deep breaths,” Dr. Banner said, “and imagining I’m on a beach in Maui with children playing in the surf.” He considered. “I don’t suppose you have some ice water I can put on my face.”

“I’ll install it in the Mark II,” Toni said.

“I was thinking about on the plane,” Dr. Banner said. 

“On it.” Toni switched to internal audio and the Rumlow channel. “Dr. Banner wants ice water to stick his face in.” 

“Get him here, and we’ll do it,” Rumlow said. 

“Is Roger okay?”

“Yep,” Rumlow said. “Those twenty AIM soldiers, not so much. You’ve been noticing how you’ve been getting fewer bullets?”

“Yes, and I’m grateful,” Toni said. “We were supposed to have another six days, what the fuck happened?” 

“AIM lies to their foot soldiers about when the operation will be,” Rumlow said, “we had six different dates and we synthesized them into our best guess.”

“Great,” Toni said, “that’s great, you couldn’t have told me this before I started dodging bullets--”

“I would suggest you focus on the bullets,” Rumlow said, “instead of criticizing me. There will be plenty of time for that later. --Although are you grateful now that you don’t have to keep track of a negotiator?”

Toni did not dignify that with an answer as she switched back to external audio.

“Got your ice water,” she said. 

“Beach in Maui,” Dr. Banner repeated, “beach in Maui…”

Toni saw the bullet flying at her through her eyes before she saw it on radar; she took a hard right, and it went right past her. Goddammit. 

The plane was visible now. She wished they’d parked closer, but Rumlow’s thought process was solid-- they didn’t want a bunch of AWI agents to possibly fall victim to the Hulk, and so they wanted to park far enough away that they could escape before Hulk could arrive. (Toni, being a supersoldier, did not get any such privilege. If Dr. Banner Hulked, she’d be on Hulksitting duty.)

Another bullet, this one she eluded just in time. “Shit, shit, shit, that was close.”

“You know, all of this veering about isn’t exactly good for me not turning into the Other Guy,” Dr. Banner said. 

“I bet being hit with a bullet would be even worse,” Toni said. 

“But perhaps you could figure out a way to avoid bullets and fly in a little more of a straight line,” Dr. Banner said. 

“I am doing the best I can,” Toni said, “I have never actually done supersoldiering before, give me a break.”

“Well, you’re doing a very good job given that it’s your first time,” Dr. Banner said encouragingly. 

“Beach in Maui, Dr. Banner,” Toni said. “Sipping a margarita--”

“I don’t drink.”

“You’re missing out.”

And then-- oh shit-- a hail of bullets, coming in on every side, Toni tried to take evasive action but even seeing them on radar before didn’t help, she dodged and dodged and she felt sick to her stomach and part of her tried to pretend it was a game, just a video game like Asteroids where the enemies came faster and faster and there was more and more to avoid and she had one life and all she had to do was not get hit, but she knew that it was all too real and she was almost at the plane and all she had to do was not let Dr. Banner get hit, it was okay if the suit got hit they’d survive if the suit got hit but no matter what happened Dr. Banner had to be okay--

The suit shuddered again. She’d failed. “Diagnostics, Jarvis,” Toni barked, her eyes on the radar screen as she moved. 

“It wasn’t us,” Jarvis said. “The suit’s the same as it was.”

Dr. Banner looked at his arm with mild curiosity. Blood dripped onto Toni’s suit. “I think,” he said, “I think I’m starting to feel angry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY AN UPDATE
> 
> sorry guys there was really no excuse for this


	9. Chapter 9

People didn’t really think of Hulk as being that big a deal. 

Well, they had when the blurry videos on YouTube became news reports on CNN and the handful of rumored deaths became the destruction of a large part of Harlem. But in the past couple years-- as Hulk sightings became rarer and the news moved on to different topics-- everyone had sort of gotten used to the existence of Hulk. There was a giant green guy, and sometimes he killed thousands of people, and he was hiding somewhere and clearly didn’t want to kill anybody right now, and that just about settled it. It became less of a national tragedy and more fodder for cool action movies. Hulk had become iconic, and then he had become cliche, and then he had become fodder for edgy comedians, and he wasn’t scary anymore.

Toni, who was currently facing Hulk, had to rapidly revise that assessment. Hulk was definitely scary. Hulk was shit-your-pants terrifying.

One thing the pictures didn’t really convey was how big Hulk was. You saw him next to a building and you were like “oh, nine feet, that’s not so bad.” But in reality he was about twice Toni’s height, and his arms were the size of Toni’s torso, and it was a lot more vivid when it wasn’t on a TV screen. The cameras had never really gotten a good look at Hulk’s face, either. It was very nearly human, but it was clearly not: the proportions were subtly off, it moved in a way no human face would move, and in its eyes was nothing but rage. 

“Rumlow,” Toni said, “tell Winter Soldier to focus on drawing AIM’s attention. I’ll get Hulk away from civilians and we’ll pick him up once he’s back to Dr. Banner.”

“Done,” Rumlow said. 

Now it was time to play. 

Jarvis had questioned Toni’s choices of development priorities. Flying made sense. Shooting missiles made sense. Super-strength made sense. Repulsor beams had an obvious use. However, he had doubted Toni’s logic when she’d decided that one of the most important aspects of her suit was the ability to play her own theme music. 

“When will this ever be useful?” Jarvis had asked.

“Like my dad said,” Toni had said, “you never know when heavy metal will come in handy.”

“I think he was referring to the type of chemical element,” Jarvis had said. 

To be honest, Toni had mostly been motivated by spite: it had long been her contention that her explosives ought to accompany themselves with Thunderstruck, as a form of shock and awe. Unfortunately, the suits in Washington had turned her down, because it “wouldn’t serve a military purpose” and “would involve a clusterfuck of copyright issues.” (Her attempts to point out that (a) the government decided what was under copyright and could change its mind whenever it liked and (b) awesomeness was totally a valid military purpose went unheeded.) Now that she was in charge of her own suit, she could make it play as much AC/DC as she liked, whatever Jarvis thought. 

Well, now Jarvis was going to eat his words, because being able to play her own theme music had just come in incredibly handy.

Jimmy Page started playing one of his most immortal guitar riffs. “We come from the land of the ice and snow,” Robert Plant wailed, “from the midnight sun and the hot spring’s glow.”

The effect on Hulk was astonishing. Previously, he had been taking out his anger on random trees and fleeing AIM soldiers (a pastime Toni would have approved of if not for the risk of Roger getting caught as collateral damage). Now he stared straight at Toni. 

Jackpot.

Toni would have fled from Hulk’s unblinking inhuman gaze, but she was in a sort of fugue state. The plan had been executed. The plan was working. She had built this thing, and it was starting to work, and she felt as proud as a mother who watched her offspring take its first toddling steps. It was probably the music. It was hard not to feel epic when Led Zeppelin was screaming in your ear about Vikings. 

Toni flew close to Hulk’s ear. “Hey, is that really annoying?” she said. “Yeah, you really hate that, don’t you, you big green lump! Yep! Wow, Led Zeppelin just hurts your eardrums, doesn’t it?”

Hulk tried to swat Toni out of the sky with one large clumsy hand. She escaped easily and returned back to her position near his ear. “You wish I’d stop playing it, right?” she said. “You want to make the music go away?”

“Hulk smash,” Hulk said.

“That’s exactly right,” Toni said. “Hulk smash. Good Hulk!” She edged a little bit away from him. “Come on, come on… you know you want to smash the person who’s making the ear-splitting music… I’m right over here, away from all these civilians…”

Hulk’s large feet made a booming noise as he followed Toni. 

“You know they used to play this stuff to torture people, right?” Toni said. “I’ve got some Van Halen up next, just for you.” Hulk tried to grab Toni and she darted out of the way. “Oops, missed me, Big Guy.”

“Metal man talk too much,” Hulk complained.

“Oh, you hate me talking?” Toni said. “Don’t worry, I can talk, I can talk your ear off-- whoops!” Toni narrowly escaped Hulk’s hand.“Now, let’s walk away from those buildings-- it’s important to only demolish buildings when there aren’t any people in them, my dad taught me that, words of wisdom you’d do well to listen to--”

“I cannot believe,” Jarvis said, “you are somehow managing to solve a problem by talking and playing eighties rock.”

“My core competencies, as Pep would say.” Toni floated right between Hulk’s eyes. She hoped she was making him crosseyed. “Greatest engineer of all time or greatest engineer of all time? What do you think, Hulk? Oh, wait, let me guess. Hulk Smash. I have to say you’re a nice person but your ability to communicate a little to be desired-- no, wait, don’t go that way! I’m over here! Annoying talking person is over here!”

Hulk turned his head back to Toni. “Yes, good, exactly, you want to smash me, I am the puniest and most smashable.” Toni backpedaled slowly. “Away from civilians, that’s right, neither you nor I want any more deaths on our conscience…”

The dulcet tones of Immigrant Song gave way to Eruption. “One of the greatest bits of guitar in the entire world, you know,” Toni said conversationally. 

Hulk moaned. 

“Not a fan of two-handed tapping, I take it,” Toni said. “No worries. Bohemian Rhapsody is next, there’s not a person in the entire world who doesn’t like Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Hulk did not like Bohemian Rhapsody. Toni was shocked. Absolutely shocked. 

“Okay, this looks good,” Toni said. “Trees. Lots of trees. Trees are good. I mean, you’re probably going to cause a considerable amount of environmental damage, but the hippies are always picketing Stark Industries anyway. It’s like they don’t want me to create a source of clean renewable energy--”

 

“Puny trees,” Hulk said. 

“Yes, that’s right, that’s it exactly,” Toni said. “You beat the shit out of those puny trees. Now let’s get a little further away from AIM because I don’t think you’d like what they do to you…”

“Noise stop,” Hulk said. 

“I am going to make the noise stop.” Toni found herself getting weirdly fond of Hulk. He wasn’t malicious, really; when he was destructive, he was destructive like a toddler. A terrifying nine-foot-tall toddler who if he could get his hands on Toni would be able to smash her into smithereens, suit or no suit. “Just as soon as you’re far enough away from those guys who want to imprison you. I don’t think you like being imprisoned, huh, big guy?”

“Hulk smash metal man,” Hulk said. 

“You’ve really got a one-track mind, haven’t you?” Toni said. Keep talking, keep talking. It didn’t matter what nonsense she spewed, as long as she was talking and Hulk was listening and they were trending steadily away from AIM. “Reminds me of my first college boyfriend. Guess that’s what you get when you’re looking for twenty-year-olds who are willing to fuck fifteen-year-olds. Anyway, for the record, I’m not a metal man, I’m a metal woman, if you keep going like that the feminists are going to get up in arms about you. Mass murder is one thing but sexism is quite another--”

They were safe, Toni figured. Any civilian who wandered this far away from their home when Hulk was on the loose deserved whatever they got. Toni flipped off the music; Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion faded mid-”yeah” into silence.

Enter Phase IV. Objectives: keep Hulk in place, don’t do anything that’ll make it harder for Hulk to turn back into Bruce Banner, don’t get Hulk kidnapped. If she failed in any of those objectives, she’d have to enter Phase V. And Toni really didn’t want to enter Phase V. Her Phase V plan was as incomplete as her plan for Phase I: Convince Bruce Banner To Come With Her, although to be fair she guessed that Phase V was going to probably involve less persuading people of things so it would probably go less disastrously. 

She switched back to internal audio. “How’s Roger?”

“Don’t you have a Hulk to be fighting?” Rumlow’s voice crackled with static.

“I can’t talk to him anymore, I’m fine with him being where he is and we want him to get less angry rather than more,” Toni said.

“So you’re talking to me instead,” Rumlow said, “because God forbid you be quiet.”

“I can be quiet!” Toni said. “I can be so quiet. As soon as I install a workbench into my suit you’ll see how quiet I can be-- hey there!” Hulk had grown bored and started idly wandering away, pulling up trees by their roots and smashing them into other trees. “Bad Hulk! No running away!”

“You realize you’re talking to me, not him,” Rumlow said dryly.

“Well, yeah,” Toni said, “I’m not running any more risk of being crushed into smithereens than I have to.” She settled for floating along behind Hulk’s left shoulder, which Hulk seemed to find no more smash-worthy than, say, the ordinary member of kingdom Plantae. “I notice you didn’t answer my question. How’s Roger?”

“Having a grand time,” Rumlow said. “He just whacked an AIM soldier in the head with the corpse of a different AIM soldier.”

Toni felt cold. “Corpse?”

“Yes,” Rumlow said. “What, did you think punching people in the face with a Soviet-era metal arm left them with a minor bruise and a cool story?”

Toni hadn’t thought about it. “I… don’t want any more dead bodies on my conscience.”

“They’re mercenaries,” Rumlow said. “They sell their services to the highest bidder and they don’t care about the consequences-- as you can tell because their current job is obviously, in the eyes of any person who has been following the news even casually in the last couple of decades, going to result in thousands if not millions of people dead.”

“I thought you said they were probably going to blackmail people with the possibility of making more Hulks,” Toni said. “Not, like, actually make them.” 

“I really do not have time to explain the concept of opportunity cost right now,” Rumlow said. “There is a fight going on. There is a Hulk on the loose. Both of which you should be paying attention to.”

“Surely you could figure out some way of… using nonlethal violence?” Toni said.

“That’s a movie myth,” Rumlow said. “You hit someone on the head hard enough to incapacitate them, there’s a big chance they’re going to die. And we can’t accept the greater risk of AIM capturing Hulk to potentially save the lives of literal murderers.”

Toni’s silence was sullen. Finally, she said, “I joined the AWI because I was sick of killing people.”

“Because you were sick of killing civilians,” Rumlow corrected. “This is a battle. People die. And if you’d like there to be fewer of these in the future, we have to win this one now. Speaking of, an AIM member escaped custody and he’s heading your way.”

“Crap,” Toni said. 

“Don’t hesitate to kill him,” Rumlow said sharply. 

The problem with Toni’s plan, she thought, is that Hulk towered over all the trees. And even if he didn’t, the path he’d made through the forest was-- she glanced at the crushed and mangled greenery-- obvious. There wasn’t exactly any such thing as stealth when you were dealing with Hulk, especially if you couldn’t explain to him why it would be in his best interest for him to be stealthy. Did he even understand the concept of ‘imprisonment’?

Toni spun around, readied her repulsor blasts, and found herself face-to-face with an AIM soldier.

“I really don’t want to do this,” Toni said.

The AIM soldier aimed his gun and shot her. 

“Now, that’s not being very nice,” Toni said, dodging easily. “I don’t want to kill you. And I’m sure you don’t want to spend any more time around Hulk than you have to. I can’t imagine that a literal fight happening next to him is good for his temper, and he has this tendency to smash things, you might have heard of-- hey!” 

Toni figured that actually getting shot would probably interfere with her plan of talking sense into the AIM soldier, so she hit him with a repulsor beam, knocking him against a tree. A second, targeted repulsor beam shot knocked his gun well out of reach. 

“I can definitely give you more money than your employer,” Toni said. “Double it. Triple it. All you have to do is turn around and say you couldn’t find Hulk.” She glanced at Hulk, who was ignoring their little fight, and also clearly visible from probably a mile around. “Say I fought you off and you barely escaped with your life,” Toni corrected. 

The AIM soldier did not listen to Toni’s logic, instead jumping, twisting in mid-air, bouncing off a conveniently located tree, and grabbing Toni’s foot, starting to climb up her actual suit. 

“What are you doing?” Toni said, trying to dislodge him by shaking her foot while she adjusted the repulsor beam’s strength. “You know I have missiles in this suit, right? If shoot you with a missile you are literally going to die. At best, you’re going to lose your ability to walk. Take it from a cripple, no paycheck is worth that.” She hit him with the repulsor beam; he fell and hit the ground. 

“Obviously falling five feet after being hit by a repulsor beam is not going to kill him,” Rumlow said in her ear. “It is a little known fact that humans can only be killed by explosives--”

But the AIM soldier rose unsteadily to his feet; as Toni watched, he seemed to recover from his fall and return to his previous level of athleticism. 

“Supersoldier,” Rumlow said. “Crap.”

The AIM soldier single-mindedly ran to the other side of Toni, which-- oh. Toni couldn’t risk shooting a repulsor beam at him now without risking either the beam or the soldier hitting Hulk, which would be very harmful to both Toni’s and the soldier’s continued healths. She considered the possibility of swooping in and rescuing the soldier if she had to use a repulsor beam, but that got him close to her suit, and he was carrying a knife. There were fragile electronics in the suit he could easily stab. The AIM soldier could survive a five- or perhaps even fifteen-foot drop. Toni couldn’t.

“Just kill him already,” Rumlow said. 

“Which one of us is the supersoldier here?” Toni said. “Me.”

The AIM soldier seemed to be preparing himself for another jump. Toni braced herself, still uncertain of what to do. Maybe if she flew fast she could get him to safety before he damaged anything important and then knock him off--

As his legs were braced to begin the jump, the AIM soldier exploded.

Toni blinked. Bits of AIM soldier ash were falling from the sky. The explosion had taken less time than it took to think the words. 

“Did that guy just explode?” 

“Apparently,” Rumlow said. 

“Is this some sort of secret thing you guys didn’t want to tell me about?” Toni said. “Eyes only? Apparently spontaneous human combustion is a thing now?”

“We have… literally no records of this ever happening before,” Rumlow said.

“Did you see that?” Toni said. “Like his eyes turned that weird fiery color and then his skin started glowing from the inside and it got dark and flaky like it was ash and then he literally exploded?” Her voice got hysterical on the last few words. 

“Convenient for you,” Rumlow said. “He died and you didn’t have to kill him.”

“I didn’t want to not kill him,” Toni said, “I wanted him to not be dead.” She noticed a conspicuous absence. “...Where’s Hulk? Did I just lose Hulk? Shit, fuck, I had one job--” Of all the times for Hulk to develop the skill of stealth--

But he hadn’t, as Toni saw when she floated over to the spot the Hulk was last seen. 

Dr. Banner was curled on a rock. He was naked and-- Toni eyed him critically-- quite attractive, except for the fact that he still looked sad. Toni had always been under the impression that when wretched and tortured people were asleep they were supposed to look childlike and innocent and peaceful, but Dr. Banner had not, apparently, gotten the memo. He slept like the universe had just kicked his puppy. 

So apparently classic rock enraged Hulk, but being literally right next to a life-or-death fight with an AIM soldier which culminated in a literal explosion (holy shit! since when did people explode!) was just the thing to chill him out. Well, Toni never wanted to be the one to question other people’s coping mechanisms. 

“Hang tight for like ten minutes, we’re going to pick you up,” Rumlow said. “The Winter Soldier has cleared up the last of the AIM soldiers.”

“By ‘cleared up’ you mean ‘killed,’” Toni said sourly. 

Dr. Banner snored. A bit of drool began to drip from his mouth. 

“Look, I promise you will get a chance to offer an opinion on the Winter Soldier’s murder habits,” Rumlow said with no more than his usual level of sarcasm, “to the Winter Soldier, once we pick you up. I am certain he will take it under advisement.”


	10. Chapter 10

“Iron Maiden,” Toni said with satisfaction. 

She looked with pleasure on her news coverage: IRON MAIDEN SUBDUES HULK. They’d even gotten a good picture of her, she felt. 

“Apparently you weren’t the only person who approved of your musical tastes,” Jarvis said. 

Toni’s sleep schedule was normally too messed up for breakfast (although she was a big fan of 7 AM Dinner). But after the fight she’d just collapsed into bed, which meant she was approximating a normal sleep schedule. And now that she was experiencing breakfasting together she sort of liked it. It was cozy. 

Roger was sitting on a counter, his back against the wall, glaring at everyone as if he was prepared at any moment for violence to break out and chewing a pretentious hipster bagel in a fashion that conveyed that he might be enjoying it but he didn’t have to like it. Pepper didn’t believe in breakfast, but she was delicately sipping a mug of coffee mixed with butter as she answered her email on her smartphone. Toni thought butter coffee sounded disgusting, but Pepper swore by it. To be honest, Toni had always thought that Pepper would be a tea person, but apparently coffee was the blood of personal assistants everywhere.

Dr. Banner was, it turned out, a tea person. Herbal tea, specifically; caffeine raised the heart rate. After ransacking Toni’s bare cupboards, he had somehow managed to locate an avocado, a tomato, a slice of bread that wasn’t moldy, and a half-disassembled toaster, and combined them into a healthy and nutritious breakfast. He ate mindfully. It was probably Buddhist. Dr. Banner seemed like the sort of person who would be Buddhist.

Toni was pacing around the room in her chair and eating Pop Tarts because adulthood was a social construct. 

“People have already started speculating that it’s Stark Industries tech,” Pepper said, not looking up from her phone. “I should probably do a conference call with Obie and maybe Rumlow to talk about how we’re handling your press. I assume you’re not coming.”

Toni resented the implication that she was going to do the thing that she was, in fact, totally going to do. “Are you going to tell the press that I’m Iron Maiden and rescued everyone from Hulk and it’s totally badass?” 

“I think not,” Pepper said. “Have you seen our latest stock prices?”

Toni shook her head and peeked over Pepper’s shoulder. Attempted to peek over Pepper’s shoulder. The chair only made her shortness worse. But given that she couldn’t tell what Pepper was reading anyway-- “I assume those little black lines are the bad little black lines?”

“Awful,” Pepper said. “We have a lot of factories that only make weapons. Retooling them to make something else is really hard. And the stock prices would only be lowered by the revelation that our CEO and genius engineer secret weapon is fighting the Hulk instead of working on putting the company in the black-- however badass her theme music.” 

“I’m inventing things!” Toni said. She felt she was being treated very unfairly. 

“To fight Hulk with,” Pepper said. “That you won’t let anyone use for purposes that involve killing people.”

“Oh yeah,” Toni said. 

“Speaking of me,” Dr. Banner said, “has it occurred to no one else what happened last time I was in New York City? Thousands of people died. This is not a safe accommodation for me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Toni said. “I invented you this nifty thing. I made this basically unbreakable plastic a while ago, which turned out not to have any industrial uses because it was way expensive and most people were content with the current level of unbreakability of their materials. Anyway. So when the Other Guy comes to visit, he can bang on the plastic as much as he wants, it’s not going to do anything.”

“And I’m supposed to-- realize I’m turning into the Other Guy?” Bruce said. “Get in my little safe place? Not a long-term solution. Not even a short-term solution.”

“Actually,” Toni said. “It furls up. Jarvis can move it anywhere in the building and unfurl it on top of you and, poof, the Other Guy is safe as can be.” She grinned. “We’re giving it its own elevator!”

“Remind me again why this isn’t already in place,” Dr. Banner said.

“Permits,” Pepper said, thin-lipped. “To renovate the building.”

“Have you pointed out to them that every day they don’t issue the permits they run the risk that another Harlem will happen?” Dr. Banner said.

“Well, for obvious reasons, I am unable to inform the United States government that I am currently housing the Hulk,” Pepper said. “We did not rescue you from AIM so you could be indefinitely detained by the government. But nevertheless I am throwing the full force of Stark Industries’s lawyers behind the problem.”

“Misappropriating company resources for fun and profit!” Toni added.

“This is exactly the sort of attitude,” Jarvis said, “that makes the chart of your company’s stock prices look rather like a cliff.”

“Anyway,” Toni said comfortingly to Dr. Banner, “all you have to do is hang tight for the next couple of weeks and not turn into a giant green ragemonster and then you can get angry five times a day if you want to.” She grinned. “It’s about time we have renovations, honestly. We have way too many stairs, and have you ever tried to take a shit in this house while using a wheelchair? Impossible.”

“Toni,” Pepper said, “people are eating.”

“Why was I not placed in a safehouse?” Dr. Banner asked. “In Iowa, for instance. I like Iowa. Nothing but corn and Jesus billboards as far as the eye can see.”

“Nothing that wouldn’t be improved with a little smashing,” Toni said. Dr. Banner did not laugh. Toni was mildly offput. “Anyway, you can go anywhere you want. We’re really genuinely not kidnappers. If you want to go to Iowa, be my guest. But here you live with me and Roger. Two supersoldiers. I know you didn’t see him in action but he’s pretty impressive.”

“Thank you,” Roger said, his mouth full of bagel. Apparently no one taught the Winter Soldier manners. 

“But are you going to find two supersoldiers in Iowa?” Toni asked. “I’m going to guess not, unless there’s codename Billboard, whose power is guilt-tripping women about having abortions. Without us, AIM can stop by and kidnap you any time they feel up to it, and when you hulk out there’s no one to try to minimize the damage.”

“I can’t imagine what I would do,” Dr. Banner commented, “without your brilliant thought of playing, what was it, Smoke on the Water at me?”

Toni chose to ignore the snark. “Plus, this is way nicer than the place you were living before.” Toni made a face thinking about the hut. “We have good tea. Jarvis to cater to your every need. Indian takeout--”

“Spice raises the heart rate,” Dr. Banner commented.

“Okay, then,” Toni said, “burritos.”

“I do like burritos,” Dr. Banner said. 

“See?” Toni glanced at Roger to solicit his agreement about what a nice place they were staying in, so much better than his previous… wherever he was staying… but she was instantly distracted. “Roger! Your arm.”

“What?” Roger looked at his flesh arm, which was holding a bagel, and then at his metal arm, which was partly melted, holy shit, how had Toni not noticed that before, she was the worst team leader ever. “Oh, yeah, it’s nothing.”

“It is not nothing,” Toni said. It was gruesome-looking. A good six inches of the outer part of his arm was just… flat. 

“I told Rumlow,” Roger said, surly. “It’s functional now. One of the techs is going to take a look at it when I’m frozen.” 

“You’re hurt,” Toni said. Roger opened his mouth. “I know, I know, ‘the asset does not experience pain, the asset merely reports damage that may impair its ability to carry out its duties’, but you’re actually injured--”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say,” Roger said, “it’s my metal arm. It doesn’t feel pain.”

Even in the midst of her overprotectiveness, Toni had to admit that was a fair point. “What happened?” Toni said. 

“Some of AIM’s soldiers can apparently summon fireballs,” Roger said. 

Three voices simultaneously said “WHAT?” Pepper glanced up from her smartphone, which is how you knew it was serious. 

“We’re going to go over it in the meeting this morning,” Roger said defensively. 

“Is that physically possible?” Pepper asked Toni. 

“No,” Dr. Banner said. 

“Of course it’s possible,” Toni objected, “people are doing it. By definition it’s possible if people are doing it.”

“It is an enormous violation of conservation of energy--” Dr. Banner said.

“Actually no,” Toni said, “I think they have to be using Pym particles. if you look into the research, you’ll find that their extradimensional nature allows them to violate conservation of energy, there’s this really interesting paper from CERN, I’ll send it to you--”

“Technically the energy is still conserved,” Dr. Banner said, “it’s just that the alternate Everett branch--”

Toni was on a roll. “Obviously, effective field theory breaks down a lot sooner than we expected, and much weirder than we expected. It's some sort of crazy complexification of a Randall-Sundrum braneworld, with the Pym particle being a very unorthodox--”

“Gravitino,” Dr. Banner said, looking at Toni with a new respect. “I follow you. It must create a local warping of spacetime that produces highly-boosted Unruh radiation.” 

“The new Spym exclusion limits from CERN would seem to rule out---" 

"What's a Spym?" Dr. Banner asked. 

"Vector Pym superpartner. Still hypothetical. Lots of exciting aerospace applications. See, this is what you miss when you’re out in the boonies away from arxiv access.”

“Save the physics conversations for when I’m out of the room,” Pepper said, scrolling down her smartphone screen with one well-manicured finger. “I don’t want to hear about how you’re pulling energy from the fifth dimension or whatever.”

“That’s actually literally what we’re doing,” Toni said. “In fact--”

“No physics!” Pepper said.

“Later,” Toni said to Bruce.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Dr. Banner said, smiling shyly.

Her ability to learn more about Pym particles having been blocked by Pepper’s unreasonable insistence on both conversations she understood and not getting a PhD in particle physics, Toni examined Roger’s arm more closely. Pain or not, it was clearly unacceptable for any member of her supersoldier team. If you were treating someone like a person-- and Toni was committed to treating Roger like a person-- you didn’t just leave them with a half-melted until it was convenient to fix it.

“I’m going to fix that,” Toni said. “I mean, with your consent, obviously, but you’d be an idiot not to consent I bet I can make it work a lot better. How would you like to shoot repulsor beams?”

\--

“So I’m going to put the first item on the meeting agenda,” Toni said, rolling herself close to the table. “What the fuck?”

“I don’t know,” Rumlow said. “I really don’t know.”

“That guy exploded!” Toni said. “People do not generally explode! I mean maybe if you put a bomb in their heads or something but that wasn’t what happened here. He literally transformed into fire. What the fuck.”

“It gets worse--”

“They shoot fireballs,” Toni said. “Yeah, I know, I saw Roger’s arm. Thanks for telling me, by the way.”

“It was on the agenda for the meeting,” Rumlow said, “and you literally live with him. You could have noticed.”

Toni grumbled. Pepper didn’t expect her to notice things that weren’t engineering. 

“The AWI as a whole is concerned,” Rumlow said. “There’s nothing. We’ve looked at classified documents-- things I nowhere near have clearance for-- there’s no evidence we’ve been able to find that anyone has done this before.”

“Great,” Toni said. “Scientifically implausible exploding people who can shoot fireballs. Wonderful.”

“It gets worse,” Rumlow said. “They didn’t try to blackmail us.”

Toni tilted her head. “Maybe… they blackmailed enough people and they have enough money now and they didn’t feel the need to bother you?” she asked uncertainly. 

“AIM doesn’t do that,” Rumlow said. “They’re greedy, they take as much money as they can get. But, no, we reached out to our contacts in espionage, counterespionage, supersoldier organizations, the mob… nothing. No one’s been blackmailed. No one’s even heard of this.”

“Explain the implications,” Toni said. 

“It means they’re not planning to hold it back,” Rumlow said, “and not use it. They’re planning on selling it to someone. Or everyone.”

“Fuck.” 

“I don’t understand what’s so bad about this,” Roger said. “It just makes people shoot fireballs and explode. The explosions are useful for suicide bombing maybe, but you can already suicide bomb plenty well with conventional weaponry-- and whatever it is is likely to be too expensive for conventional use. The fireballs aren’t that much worse from an ordinary flamethrower. An undetectable suicide bomb that doesn’t run out of ammo is dangerous but not a total game-changer.”

Toni was about to complain that of course it mattered, it was going to revolutionize physics, but apparently Roger wasn’t one for science without applications. Ugh. She was going to have to corner Dr. Banner and geek out at him. She was getting the feeling that she was going to like living with someone who could keep up with her and wasn’t a computer. 

“AIM had at least four supersoldiers,” Rumlow said. “I’ve seen the videos of some of the most feared supersoldiers in the business-- codename Hawkeye, codename Black Widow, Captain America of course, and our very own Winter Soldier-- and it’s unmistakeable. They survived things no one could survive, they did feats Olympians have trouble with without breaking a sweat.”

“I tore them apart like tissue paper,” Roger said. The casualness in his voice made a pit in Toni’s stomach. 

“That’s the thing,” Rumlow said. “So far-- except for Captain America-- there have been two strategies for creating supersoldiers. One, raise them from birth, like the Red Room that produced Black Widow. That’s the usual way to get more than one supersoldier, because training two isn’t that much more expensive than training one, and you need spares for the ones that die anyway. Two, fuck them up like our friend Winter Soldier over here-- no offense Roger.”

“None taken,” Roger said. 

“The supersoldiers fought like they weren’t used to their abilities,” Rumlow said. “They were highly trained mercenaries, of course, but highly trained ordinary human mercenaries. And no way does AIM have the resources to produce four Winter Soldiers, even if they found out how-- and that knowledge was lost after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

“So AIM couldn’t have been sitting on a bunch of people they were training,” Toni said. “Which means they figured out how to mass-produce supersoldiers. And they haven’t started selling them--”

“--Because their supersoldiers have this slight little problem of exploding,” Rumlow said. “But that’s not an insurmountable obstacle. Particularly since AIM’s supersoldiers can shoot fireballs from their hands, which no one else can do because, as you pointed out so aptly, it makes no scientific sense whatsoever. If AIM makes the soldiers cheaply enough, it can be worth it for a whole host of stakeholders to recruit a few thousand soldiers willing to risk everything and purchase a bunch of home-grown Captain Americas. Without the ethics.”

“Well, shit,” Roger said. 

“Particularly,” Rumlow added, “once they notice that all their enemies are buying them too. We could be looking at arms races. And the arms races are going to enrich AIM--”

“Which means they have even more money to spend researching more ways of making supersoldiers,” Toni finished. 

“Precisely,” Rumlow said. “Obviously, this is a serious risk to global stability-- perhaps even as grave as mass-produced Hulks. We’ve sent our spies to track down likely AIM locations; your next assignment is to visit them and hinder their research in as many ways as possible. I’m talking electromagnetic pulses, burning notes, assassination of key scientists… we want them unable to create more supersoldiers and, more importantly, we want them afraid to sell the supersoldiers. It’s why I’m sending in you rather than an undercover team. The psychological element is key. They should be terrified.”

“We’re not killing anybody,” Toni said. 

Rumlow looked like he’d just bitten a lemon. “A few deaths now will save thousands if not millions of lives--” 

Toni considered arguing moral philosophy. But she was an engineer. She’d never learned anything about ethics. All she knew was that she’d heard a lot of arguments from the US government about global stability and national interests, and all it led to was Yinsen dead from a bomb with Stark on the side. There would be no more deaths on her conscience. 

“Look,” Toni said, “I can quit. If Roger keeps killing people, I’m going to quit. You can’t have a team with one person. That’s not the Ultimates. That’s not a supersoldier team. That’s literally just Winter Soldier.” 

“Two people,” Rumlow said, “we have custody of Hulk--”

“And he’s allowed to do whatever he wants,” Toni said. “Remember? We’re not kidnapping him. He can make his own choices. And right now he doesn’t want to be a member of the Ultimates, so like I said. One person.”

Rumlow didn’t say anything, but his face was eloquent. It said that he was rethinking this whole business of not kidnapping people. 

“Dr. Banner is in my house,” Toni said. “I have the technology that can contain him. He likes me.” That was a blatant lie, but if it made Rumlow cooperate-- “He has no reason to trust you. And he’s definitely not going to trust you if you’re planning on turning him into another Roger, no offense Roger. If I quit, he comes with me. If you kill people, I quit. If you do anything to Dr. Banner without his express verbal consent, I quit. Are we clear?”

Roger was watching this discussion with obvious interest, rather as if a football game had unexpectedly broken out in the middle of the dull meeting. 

“You put a lot of social capital on the line to build this team,” Toni said. “I don’t think it would look good on your resume if it fell apart. I can do good here, but there are lots of ways for me to do good. I have no problem retiring my suit and devoting my time to starting deworming charities. Without me, you’re on stakeout duty for the rest of your life.” She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Frankly, Rumlow, you need me more than I need you. Start acting like it.”

“No killing people unless it’s mission-critical,” Rumlow said. He spoke as if he had to force each word through his teeth. 

Toni flashed a brilliant smile. “I’m so glad when we can come to a mutually beneficial consensus.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Adam Nonternary for helping me write the technobabble!


	11. Chapter 11

“Got your new arm!” Toni said. 

She’d been worried, at first, about the process of taking Roger’s arm on and off, but it was surprisingly easy. Which made sense: the arm needed maintenance, and the techs probably didn’t want to fix it while it was attached to Roger, any more than Toni did. The metal arm attached to the shoulder securely at twelve different points. Unscrewing them carefully allowed one to remove the arm without damaging it, but the arm wouldn’t fall off even during the most enthusiastic of battles.

It was good design. 

 

It was the only part of the arm that was good design. 

Figures that the only part of the arm they’d bother to make up to Toni’s exacting standards was the one they’d have to deal with themselves. Sometimes Toni loathed other engineers. 

Roger lay on a recliner Toni had commandeered from a break room, his arm elevated so Toni could get a good look at it. 

“I can’t imagine how you stood that thing,” Toni said, starting to remove the old arm, “your back must be hurting constantly. It was much too heavy for you even if you’re a supersoldier. There were at least a dozen components I easily miniaturized, and ten more that I fixed with a bit of thought--”

“I don’t know,” Roger said. “How am I supposed to know how not having your back hurt feels like?”

“Good point,” Toni said. “Anyway, I decided giving you your own arc reactor was overkill, so you have a battery pack. You can shoot repulsor beams now. You’ll have to charge the arm overnight but you shouldn’t run out of energy as long as you aren’t, like, shooting off repulsor beams constantly for two days straight.”

With a click, Toni finished removing the old arm. She placed it on the table and picked up the new arm, which was a tenth of the weight and twice as durable. The off-white color of the casing Toni felt like was maybe a little tacky, a little “ugh this is going to be retrofuturistic in three decades”, but then the arm she was replacing had a literal Soviet star on it so it wasn’t like it was wore. 

“You don’t like that I kill people,” Roger said. 

Roger definitely did have a way of picking the best times to have serious discussions. “Well, it’s not exactly my favorite thing in the world,” Toni said, lining up the arm with its socket. 

“You made me an arm,” Roger said. His voice sounded like he was trying to figure something out.

“Yes, I did,” Toni said, feeling a sense of satisfaction when the first attachment point slid in like butter. “Strange as it may seem, I was there for the vast majority of the process.”

“You show me movies,” Roger said. “You remember that I like grilled cheese and Starbucks, even when I don’t remember it. You named me. Even Rumlow calls me ‘Roger’ half the time now.”

“Again, I was there for all those things,” Toni said, her neck bent so she could get a good look at the arm. “I know.”

“You care about me,” Roger said. It wasn’t a question.

Toni’s heart was in her throat as she selected a smaller wrench for the next attachment point. “Yes.”

“Why?” Roger asked. “Since I kill people.”

“It’s your winning personality,” Toni said. “Turns out I have a huge thing for guys who speak of themselves as ‘the asset’ instead of as their actual names which I had so kindly picked out for them. Who knew, right? Different strokes, I guess.”

Normally, flippancy was an excellent strategy for preventing conversations about ethics and emotions and other things that began with ‘e’ that Toni wasn’t very good at dealing with (unlike ‘engineering’, which she was). Many times Jarvis, Obie, and Pepper had given up in despair. 

Roger, unfortunately, was made of sterner stuff. “If you think I’m doing something bad,” Roger said, “shouldn’t you hate me?”

Leave it to the guy with a couple weeks of memory to ask the direct question. “I don’t know,” Toni said, “Maybe I shouldn’t care about you. Maybe I should be like ‘Roger, heartless assassin, doesn’t deserve to have an arm that doesn’t pain him, I’m going to spend all the time I would have spent working on it helping widows and orphans have awesome cyborg arms that can shoot repulsor beams.’” 

Installing the aforementioned arm was going off without a hitch-- which, of course, Toni had known would happen the whole time and had had absolutely no doubts about, because the quality of her engineering was superb and she would obviously be capable of inventing a prosthetic arm when she had never done it before. 

“You don’t do that, though,” Roger said. “And I don’t think you’re going to.   
Why was this the conversation Roger had chosen to have while she was literally fiddling with his body parts? Ugh. Toni wondered what brilliant topics of conversation he’d come up with during sex. 

“I’m not,” she said.

“I like killing people,” Roger said. “It’s fun. I’m good at it.”

“I know,” Toni said, tongue between her teeth. This bit was finicky…

“You’re making it easier for me to kill people,” Roger said. 

“I know,” Toni said, her mind mostly busy in the world of gears and wires and only half-attending to the conversation.

“Why?”

“The repulsor beam gives you more nonlethal options,” Toni said, mouth moving on autopilot while her thoughts were lost in the beautiful world of engineering, “which means I’m saving lives in the long run if you think about it.”

Roger hummed, not particularly satisfied by this answer. 

“Look,” Toni said, looking up from Roger’s new arm, “I only started doing this ethics thing a couple months ago. I’m not good at it yet. Most people have, like, decades more practice than I do. All I know is that when I see something as poorly designed as that arm of yours is, I’m going to fix it. Morality or no morality.”

“You don’t fix random things that belong to strangers,” Roger objected.

“Actually, I do,” Toni said, taking a brief break and rolling out her wrists a bit. “Used to sneak out when I was a teenager and repair people’s cars. It drove Obie mad.” She smiled in fond recollection. 

“Don’t most teenagers sneak out to drink?”

“Never bothered with it,” Toni said. “I just got wasted in front of them and dared them to do anything about it. They never did.”

Roger made a noise like he was thinking. 

Leaving him to his contemplations, Toni went back to work. The last attachment point caught, and Toni wheeled away from her patient. “There,” she said. “Flex your hand. Move it around a bit.”

“Feels great,” Roger said automatically, and then-- “Oh, wow, that really feels great.”

“That,” Toni said, “is what it feels like to not have back pain.”

“It’s wonderful,” Roger said, a voice like he had just discovered God. Toni felt a warm glow inside of her. There was nothing like bringing in a project on time, under budget, and perfectly satisfying to the user.

“And I can shoot repulsor beams?” Roger asked. 

“Yes,” Toni said. “But not at Rumlow or Pepper. They need to preserve their fragile dignity.”

Thirty seconds later, Toni found herself flat against the wall of her lab, the back of her head aching where she’d clunked it against the wall. Fortunately, it looked like Roger knew enough about aiming to avoid any particularly important equipment. “In retrospect,” she said, “I should have expected this.”

Roger looked smug. 

“This is violence against the disabled,” Toni said. “I am totally going to call the ADA.”

“I think that’s a law,” Roger said, “and thus you can’t call it.”

“Shows how much you know,” Toni said, rubbing the back of her aching head, “I think the Apple Design Awards are going to have a very strongly worded opinion about how you’ve treated me.”

\--

“It’s 2am,” Toni said, flying slowly down a skyscraper and counting the floors, “so no one should be working. We get in, destroy their notes, and get out.”

“So your plan depends on no engineers working at 2am?” Roger asked. “Good plan. Very solid. I can see absolutely no flaws.”

“And how do you know how late engineers stay up?” Toni said. “You have met exactly one engineer as far as you can remember. Let me tell you most engineers are not at all like me. For one thing, I am significantly more attractive--”

“I have semantic memory,” Roger said. “I am capable of knowing things. I realize this might be an unfamiliar concept for you, knowing things, but I’m sure you’ll manage.”

“I like you better when you’re just wiped,” Toni grumbled, “and you don’t know anything about snark.”

Floor thirty. Toni paused. If Rumlow’s intelligence was correct, this was where AIM had their New York City secret hideout. After briefly considering the possibilities of subtle break-ins, she crashed through the window. The alarm wouldn’t be an issue in a few minutes anyway.

“Ta da!” Toni said, waving her hands around the office room, which clearly had several things-- including computers, papers, desks, and an extremely nice coffee machine-- and which equally clearly was as deserted as Stark Industries the morning after Toni’s badass yearly Christmas party. “No engineers.”

Roger might have been defeated, but he hadn’t become a supersoldier because he was willing to admit defeat. He made a sort of grumbling acknowledgement noise and said, “First things first. We destroy the computers.” He pulled back his new metal arm, preparing to punch. 

Toni pressed a button on the wrist of her suit. There was a brief high-pitched whine. “Electromagnetic pulse,” she said. “All those computers are now just a bunch of very expensive scrap metal.”

“Showoff.” Roger began to gather up papers. “I’ll gather, you put them through the shredder, deal?”

“Sounds good,” Toni said, turning on the shredder. It was a good thing she was short, she could float six inches off the ground and still have no trouble reaching it. “Man, who thought the life of a supersoldier was so similar to the life of a receptionist? Having meetings, dealing with documents...”

“Important documents,” Roger said. “Documents that make a difference to whether the world will descend into anarchy and war or continue to preserve a fragile peace.”

Toni had some opinions about that alleged fragile peace-- namely, that it didn’t exist, as Roger would know if he had ever bothered to collect the opinions of anyone from Afghanistan-- but she felt that espionage missions, much like Thanksgiving, were not an appropriate time to talk religion or politics. She eyed the pile she was expected to shred. “Man, some of these people have got to hear about the concept of a paperless office.”

“They’re so inconsiderate to the people who are trying to break into their building and keep them from making scientific advancements,” Roger said. “If only they had thought to make our lives easy for us.”

“Yeah!” Toni said. She glanced at one of the papers. “2002 tax documents? Really? Can’t we just skip that one?”

“How about I get to kill one scientist for every paper you don’t want to shred?” Roger asked. “That sounds fair to me.”

“No.”

“It,” Roger said smugly, “is gains from trade.”

Toni glared and went back to shredding, wondering whose bright idea it was to teach Roger about economics. Probably Pepper. 

Soon enough all the papers in the room were nothing but neat shreds, suitable for turning into confetti or making paper-mache but absolutely useless for any sort of supersoldier-related purpose. Toni floated her way into the second office. 

The second… not office. 

It was a ghoulish parody of a hospital room. Everything looked the same: the crisp white sheets on the rollable bed, the gently beeping monitors flashing green lights, the cream-colored walls, even the flowers with a “Get Well Soon!” card jauntily positioned among the greenery. (Toni guessed she should have known that even mercenaries had families.) It was only the context that made Toni shudder.

A man was curled on the bed. He seemed to be neither asleep nor awake but in the strange half-doze of the very ill. He was wan and dark-haired and vaguely attractive. He didn’t seem to be chained to anything. But then-- Toni thought-- that IV might do just as well as a chain. He didn’t want to rip it out of his skin, and if he were drugged, there might be no chance of escape.

It was worth asking about, anyway.

“It’s okay,” Toni said to the man, “we’ll rescue you.”

“Rescue me?” the man said, puzzled and a little bit sleepy. “Why?”

“Uh,” Toni said, “isn’t AIM holding you captive?”

Roger made an annoyed noise. Yeah, yeah, move on with it, Toni knew. But it was important not to rescue people unless they wanted to be rescued. Otherwise it was called ‘kidnapping’ and it was frowned upon in most cultures. 

“I’m a patient,” the man said blearily. 

“One of their mercs?” Toni asked. “Looking to get a little extra boost? A little… ability to shoot fireballs?”

The man’s eyes fixed on Toni for the first time. “Who are you?” he said suspiciously. “Are you a robot?”

“Uh,” Toni said. “Yes. Definitely. I’m a robot. And here’s my cyborg pal, Roger.” Roger waved hi sarcastically. “You have to tell me about what happened to you because… reasons. It’s an experiment.” Toni would have crossed her fingers if she could. It was an old MIT trick. You could get away with anything if you claimed it was for an experiment. 

“I thought you said something about rescuing me?” the man said. 

“All part of the experiment,” Toni said. “We’ll debrief you after.”

The man had apparently had enough experience with AIM that he took this at face value. “So what do you want to know?”

“Tell me your background,” Toni said.

“Shouldn’t that be in my file?” the man said. “You’re a robot, shouldn’t you have--” The man made an obscure gesture that indicated something like ‘downloading’ “--you know, put it in your metal brain or something. Do robots have brains?”

“Humor me,” Toni said. 

“I have ALS,” he said. “I was going to have to be on a respirator, and my life expectancy… wasn’t looking good. They came to me… said it was experimental and there was a chance of me dying, but… I could breathe on my own.”

So. Not a merc. Unless he was lying, but she wouldn’t learn anything if she assumed he was lying.

”With Extremis, I can… live a full life, a long life,” the man said. “I would be healthy again. Not just healthy. Strong. An athlete. I could do things I wouldn’t have been able to do even before the ALS. I could run.”

The last three words were full of obvious yearning. Toni sympathized. She had never felt all that much desire to run when she was actually capable of it, but now that she couldn’t… she would give anything to be able to push her body as far as it could go.

She’d never been able to read. She’d occasionally idly wondered what people got out of those black lines they stared at so intensely, but not seriously, in the same way she idly wondered about going to Mars. Actually, she was significantly more motivated by going to Mars than she was by being able to read. But she remembered what it was like to feel the wind in her hair and the burn in her muscles and the racing of your heart, and to run for the sheer joy of being a body, and to stop, panting for breath, and laugh.

The man was looking at her expectantly.

“And then they tricked you and imprisoned you?” Toni proposed. 

“No?” the man said. “I’m on my last twenty-four hours of monitoring now, and then I get to go back to my house. The doctors will want to check on me every couple of months, of course.”

Huh. Well, if he was being tricked and imprisoned, he didn’t know about it yet-- which wasn’t 100% proof, of course, but certainly did make it less likely. “Did they charge you a lot of money? A debt you’re going to have to spend years paying off?” Maybe AIM had decided that there was more money in disabled people than there was in supersoldiers… of course, the two wouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

“No,” the man said. “It was free. They said the guy in charge used to be sick too. He made Extremis to fix himself and he wanted to fix other people. People who needed it.”

That was… weird. Assuming that that guy was telling the truth, and he hadn’t been lied to… that wasn’t at all what she was led to believe AIM’s modus operandi was. Sometime soon she was going to have to have a long talk with Rumlow. 

“Toni,” Roger said. 

“Not now,” Toni said.

“Toni,” Roger repeated. “He’s on his last twenty-four hours of monitoring.”

“Monitoring,” Toni said, a sinking feeling in her stomach. “Roger, we have to go. Now.”

“Just let me clean up the loose end and we’ll head out,” Roger said. 

Toni knew what the loose end was and exactly how Roger was planning on cleaning it up. “Now,” Toni said in her best imitation of Pepper.

Toni had realized that she had to carry people far too often to not make specific provisions. Roger jumped on her back as if she were giving him a piggyback ride; straps flew out of the suit, buckling him on her back, while out of her thighs grew two footrests, which also automatically strapped him in securely. 

“You good?” Toni asked.

“Great,” Roger said.

“Let’s go.”

Toni had, over the course of her life, gotten certain ideas about walls. For instance, she had usually understood them to be solid things that, if you ran into them, would leave you with a serious headache. Having an Iron Maiden suit had made her start to change her mind about some of these cherished and long-held assumptions, but even so it had yet to start being intuitive. 

Toni took a deep breath, reminded herself that her beliefs about walls were inaccurate and they were actually as fragile and breakable as paper, and ran. 

As they passed the Extremis patient, who was wondering and burst through the wall and out to the bright night of New York City, Toni said to herself, “Oh yeah.”

“What?” Roger said. 

“It’s a--” Toni contemplated the possibility of explaining to Roger who, exactly, the Kool-Aid man is. “Never mind.”

“We should have killed the guy,” Roger said. 

“No,” Toni said. “He has nothing to do with this. He’s just someone who has ALS and that AIM was treating.” She didn’t add: _or planning to use as a soldier. Or planning to surprise with an enormous bill they’ll use to fund their other activities. Or using as a convenient guinea pig that they don’t have to pay_. She felt that it probably wouldn’t help the case. 

With great finality, Roger said, “It’s going to bite us in the ass that we didn’t kill the guy.”


	12. Chapter 12

About a week later, Toni and Roger were on the roof of Stark Tower, looking out over New York City. The view wasn’t quite as good as it was flying, but Toni had been in her wheelchair all day in the lab, and the concept of transferring made her arms ache just thinking about it. So they were resting after a hard day’s work in companionable silence, without any need to talk with each other, just enjoying each other’s company. Toni had worked only an eleven-hour day this time. She was pretty sure that Roger was good for her. Work-life balance and all that.

“You made me an arm,” Roger said. 

Apparently Roger had not gotten the memo about companionable silence. 

“Not this again,” Toni said. Honestly. This is why she liked Stark Industries, where she was safely cocooned away from users by a protective bubble of lawyers. 

“You know what kind of food I like and movies,” Roger said. “Nobody… bothered to keep track of that before. They just assumed that because I don’t know it no one else can. And you put up with me when I was newly wiped and kind of terrible at being a person.”

“The secret,” Toni said, “is that I’m also kind of terrible at being a person.” She crossed her arms, hoping this would stave off a long and boring convers. 

Ugh. Why were men constantly trying to talk to Toni about their feelings? “You broke my heart, Toni.” “I’m in love with you, Toni, and I can’t bear to be without you.” “I really thought we had something special, Toni.” You cowrite two papers and have one drunken hookup with somebody and suddenly they’re making heart-eyes at you when they think you can’t see and writing Mr. Toni Stark on all their notebooks and, on one memorable occasion, proposing marriage in the middle of Time Square. God, in her relationship with Rhodey, near the end, it felt like he did nothing but have feelings. Big dramatic noisy feelings about the relationship and where this was going and his emotional needs and how dare you leave me to go in the lab and work, Toni, this is important… Toni gently steered her thoughts away from Rhodey. 

Roger looked out into the night. “You named me.”

“Technically,” Toni said, “and I’m only clarifying because you have that amnesia thing going on and so you don’t remember, but you named you. I just called you by it. And, seriously, what kind of person doesn’t call someone by their name?”

“Everyone I interacted with before you,” Roger said. 

“Oh,” Toni said. 

“I don’t think Rumlow… means anything by it,” Roger said. “He’s not… cruel. He’s never been cruel.” Roger’s mouth quirked in a humorless smile. “At least as far as I can remember.”

No, Rumlow wasn’t cruel. He was ruthless, yes, but ruthlessness had a certain kindness to it. A cat played with a mouse, chasing it and letting it go free until the poor thing was nearly as dead from fright as it would eventually be from the cat’s jaws. If the cat were Rumlow, he’d break the mouse’s spine with one bite; a faster way to get dinner. Cruelty was an inefficiency, like a motor that didn’t connect to anything or a superfluous gear. And in matters of morality Rumlow had an engineer’s mind; his actions were simple, elegant. He would never harm Roger unnecessarily, and he would never remember that Roger preferred his coffee with soy milk. 

“I’m…” Roger paused, seeming to be looking for the right word. “Grateful.”

“You shouldn’t be,” Toni said. “I just treated you like people are supposed to treat people. Probably worse. I’m kind of famously an asshole, just ask any of my paparazzi. I shouldn’t get any credit for basic fucking decency.”

“You do if you’re the only one who’s decent.” 

Toni harrumphed. “No, it makes them even more assholes than I am.” 

Toni had gotten lotteried out of both Intro Psych and Harmony & Composition for her humanities credit at MIT, and much to her horror wound up in a literature class instead She stumbled her way through by commissioning audiobooks and dictating her papers to Rhodey. (She had occasionally wondered how much resemblance those papers bore to what she dictated, but then it wasn’t like she could tell, and her grades were great.) Anyway, one of the books they’d read or, in Toni’s case, listened to was the Great Gatsby, and it had had a line that stuck with her: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” 

That was Toni. She didn’t know if it was because she was American, or rich, or just generally kind of a douchebag, but that was her. She meant well-- most of the time, anyway. She wasn’t a bad person when the problem was actually in front of her and she didn’t have anything more interesting to think about. She just didn’t think. She did things that she thought were awesome, or she got nerd-sniped by a problem, or something seemed fun and she tried it out, and next thing she knew Pepper had to bail her out of jail or Obie was sighing and talking about the stockholders or there was a picture of her puking on the cover of US Weekly with the caption “Toni Stark Friends Worried, Rehab Soon?” or she’d killed Yinsen (and that thought still sent a wave of nausea through her). 

She wondered if being aware of her carelessness made it better. Probably not. Probably it made it worse. It was one thing to not know you were careless and quite another to know and insist on being careless anyway. Like someone who knew their last ten engines broke and who didn’t bother to stress-test the eleventh one...

Roger, however, was talking during Toni Stark Introspection Time, which was absurdly inconsiderate of him. If men were going to insist on Toni having feelings they should at least have the grace to be quiet while she was having them. “You keep doing nice things for me,” Roger concluded.

That was what he kept saying, yes. At least it was a change from the usual content of Men Having Feelings At Toni, which was that she kept being awful to them for no reason and didn’t she know that having sex with them once was an unbreakable contract to marry them and have their babies and grow old together and be buried in the same tomb.

Roger hesitated. “What I don’t understand is… why.”

“I told you,” Toni said. “I just do what anyone would do.” She considered. “And I fixed your arm but, like, come on. That was awfully designed. My heart just about broke in two looking at it.”

“You’re lying,” Roger said. 

“No, I’m not,” Toni said. 

“I can read microexpressions,” Roger said. “You’re lying.”

Well, that was a terrifying new power. Toni felt that someone should disclose when they are capable of reading microexpressions before you assumed they were a normal person who would be deceived by ‘I only had two drinks.’ “Do you know every time I’m lying?” Toni asked. 

“Yes,” Roger said. “You lie a lot. I don’t think you mean to.”

Jesus Christ. This was as bad as the last time she was in therapy. Toni was pretty sure that socially incapable assassins were not supposed to be that good at reading people. If you don’t understand that it’s okay to have a favorite food, then you shouldn’t be able to see through Toni’s coping mechanisms. That was just common courtesy. They were cherished! They were well-honed! She was proud of them!

“You like me,” Roger said. 

“Yes,” Toni said, wondering if the excruciatingly painful conversation about feelings was going to be over now.

“You care about me,” Roger said.

“Yes,” Toni said. Apparently not.

“You love me.”

Toni paused. Her mouth opened, beginning to shape flippant words-- no, of course not, how could you think that? But the lie would be as good as a confession. Roger knew when she was lying. And the person Toni most liked lying to was herself, and the fact that Roger’s skill in telling lies made her hesitate to easily deny loving him filled her with uncomfortable self-knowledge.

“Yes,” Toni said. It was like ripping off a Band-Aid. 

“Huh.” Roger seemed to take this new information in, looking out over New York City. “I don’t think anyone has loved me before.”

“Someone has to have loved you,” Toni said. “You must have had a mother at some point. Sisters, brothers. A girlfriend. Hell, maybe even a boyfriend. You might have had a whole life before you were the Winter Soldier.”

“I can’t remember it,” Roger said. “So it’s pretty much the same as not having it.”

“No, it isn’t,” Toni said quietly. 

Roger considered this.

“I wonder if they knew,” Toni said. “If they… raised you to be taken away. Or if they thought you died. Or if you just went missing and they never knew what happened to you, and they kept up hope that somewhere out there you were alive and happy.”

“They’d be in nursing homes now,” Roger said. “If they were even still alive. I’m old. That, at least, I know from my file.”

“Geriatric,” Toni said fondly. “It doesn’t say on your file where you came from?”

“I come from the lab of Dr. Armin Zola, a Nazi scientist who defected to the Russians instead of the Americans for reasons I do not know. Perhaps he was just a contrarian,” Roger said. “I don’t know where he found my raw material.”

“We could find the people who loved you,” Toni said. “Maybe you could meet them. Show them that you’re okay.”

Roger, thankfully, did not argue with Toni’s claim that he was ‘okay’. “I don’t want to,” Roger said. “I’m not… that person. Whomever they were. My--” He searched for the word.

“Body donor?” Toni proposed.

“Yeah.”

“But someone has to have loved you,” Toni said. “Maybe a tech or a handler who got reassigned because they cared too much about you. Or who this very moment is saving up money to come from the USSR to the United States to track you down. Or who died.”

“Cheerful,” Roger said. “Remind me why you care?”

“Someone has to have loved you besides me,” Toni said. “I-- don’t like the idea of you being lonely.”

“If I was always lonely, I wouldn’t have known what lonely felt like,” Roger said. “Like back pain.”

“Pain is still bad,” Toni said, “even if you have no point of comparison. Actually, that’s worse, I don’t know why you think that’s comforting.”

“I don’t actually know how this works,” Roger said. “I mean, the whole loving thing. My entire knowledge of romantic relationships comes from the romantic comedies you keep showing me.”

“Come on,” Toni said, “you had to have done a romantic relationship deep cover at some point.”

“No,” Roger said. “Not my job. I kind of have this enormous metal arm, you might have heard of it. I am more in the stealthy-killing side of things.” He reflected. “Was.”

“And the only people you talk to other than me are Rumlow, who’s married to his work, Pepper, who’s married to her work worse than Rumlow, Bruce, who’s married to being a giant green ragemonster who smashes up Manhattan, and Jarvis, who’s a building.”

“Right,” Roger said. “I assume I do not actually have to stand under your window with a boombox playing In Your Eyes. For one thing, it’s forty stories up.”

“Ugh, a boombox?” Toni said. “This is the twenty-first century here. We have iPods. Honestly, just ask Jarvis to play it into my workroom, that’s a lot easier and I don’t have to make you flying boots.”

Roger’s brow crinkled. “So I am supposed to play romantic music at you?” he said.

“...No,” Toni said, her head dancing with visions of all her cock rock being replaced with sappy ballads about whether she would still love him tomorrow. “Definitely not required. Or approved of. Or in any way a good idea.”

“Huh,” Roger said. “Am I supposed to bring you flowers? That seems to come up a lot in those movies.”

“Wait, does this mean we’re dating?” Toni said. 

“Yes,” Roger said. “You just confessed your love to me. I do think that means we’re dating.”

Toni looked suspicious. “You didn’t say it back.”

“As I have met exactly four people that I remember whom I was not trying to kill,” Roger said, “and that is counting the building, I think that would be a little bit premature. I want to get a larger sample size before I can make any firm commitments.”

Toni grumpily wondered who was teaching Roger about sample sizes. Probably Bruce. 

“But I suspect,” Roger said, “that even once I get a larger sample size it will turn out that I love you.”

Toni felt a warm glow from the top of her head to the tips of her toes-- which was particularly impressive because she normally couldn’t feel anything in her toes. 

“You know what’s normally involved in dating?” Toni asked. 

“What?” Roger said.

“Kissing,” Toni said. 

“Oh,” Roger said, “I’ve never done that before.”

“You definitely have,” Toni said. “You meet someone gorgeous on a mission who sees the real, inner you, not the gruff assassin… You save her life, sacrificing your mission objective… You fall in love... As your handler hauls you away, the last thing you hear her cry is ‘I’ll never forget you…’”

“I’m reprogrammed to stop having emotions that harm mission effectiveness,” Roger said, “and on my next mission they throw in a secondary objective to kill her, just to see how well it took.”

“Ugh,” Toni said. “Spoilsport.”

“If I don’t remember the kiss,” Roger said, “it didn’t happen.”

“It’s sort of cool to think that I get to be your first kiss,” she said. “Normally you grow out of that sort of thing in middle school. And I never actually went to middle school.” She reflected. “I got to have my first kiss six or so times, though.”

“Really?” Roger said. 

“Yeah,” Toni said, “after that all those college boys caught on. As if a sixteen-year-old supergenius can’t have hormones. Bah.”

Roger smiled. His smile was like everything good in the world: sunshine and angels and your code, after throwing the same error for six hours, finally throwing a different error. “I would really like to kiss you.”

“Me too,” Toni said. Her heart raced. Roger bent over her and pressed a kiss into her lips. 

At first he was still, hesitant, as if he were just getting his bearings. Then his lips started to move and Toni, much to her irritation, felt parts of her body actually quiver. His kiss was gentle and sensual and a little bit teasing, just on the right side of slow, and his tongue flicked out between his lips gently. His kiss was neither the forceful, aggressive kiss, slamming the tongue into Toni’s mouth, of a drunk guy at a party who wasn’t very sure who Toni was other than a wet hole but was pretty sure he didn’t care; neither was it the hesitant, awkward kiss of a brilliant scientist whom Toni had seduced for his mind and who was kind of overwhelmed by this whole business. It was almost like a caress. 

Roger broke away from the kiss and looked into Toni’s eyes, smiling slyly, his nose bumping against hers. (Toni wondered how awkwardly he must have contorted to make that happen, then concluded that his back problems were his business.) 

“Wow,” Toni said. “You definitely have kissed someone before.”

“Procedural memory,” Roger said, laughing. “Mine is better than average.”

“You can say that again.”

Roger gently stroked Toni’s lips with his thumb, then dove back into the kiss, his hands running through her hair and gently stroking her face. Toni reached her hands up and ran them along the broad muscle of his back, which was not contorted quite as awkwardly as she had feared. His mouth was open slightly, his tongue darting in and out of her mouth. Toni ached. 

She was suddenly, consciously aware of how long it had been since she’d had sex. Since Afghanistan… Men had had enough problems seeing her as a sexual being before Afghanistan, which she had mostly resolved by getting drunk enough that her news coverage was basically Science Paris Hilton. That didn’t work when you were in a wheelchair, though. Now when she drank she didn’t become Science Cripple Paris Hilton. She was just pathetic. Instead of arousal, she saw nothing but pity. And so with one thing and another this was her longest dry spell since the first college party when she figured out that if you were slutty enough men stopped caring about the law. 

Roger didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be attracted to her. 

Toni was the one who pulled away this time. “I’ve never actually had sex while being a cripple,” she said.

“So I’m a virgin and you’re a virgin,” Roger said. “We’ll make it work.”

“You’re going to procedural-memory your way to being an amazing lover,” Toni said, “I know it.”

“And you’re objecting?”

“Sluttiest virgins on record,” Toni said. “We probably beat the average fundie who knows that Jesus doesn’t mind if you take it up the ass.”

What Roger was about to say in response to that was lost to history. Toni felt a hand clasp over her mouth, thought the insane thought “how can Roger be touching me from all the way over there?”, smelled ether, and then everything was darkness.


	13. Chapter 13

When Toni Stark woke up, her first thought was that she really needed to drink less. Not knowing where or, indeed, when you woke up was all very well in your twenties, but she was almost forty-one, and that wasn’t really a good look on her.

Her second thought was that this was an extraordinarily unusual place to wake up, even by her standards. For one thing, it seemed to be either a jail cell, or a jail-cell-themed hotel room with an unusual commitment to realism with regards to the hardness of the beds and the quality of the toilets.

Her third thought was that while she was prone to having blackouts she at least usually remembered starting drinking, and her last memory was kissing Roger (holy shit, she kissed Roger!), which was (Toni was unashamed to admit) pretty fucking badass. 

Her fourth thought was that all of this seemed to be remarkably familiar. 

Afghanistan. Why did she have to repeat Afghanistan? The worst fucking experience of her entire life. She was kidnapped by the Ten Rings and so bored that she couldn’t do anything except repair cell phones for broke people and all the homes were these little mud huts that no human being could be expected to live in and the entire time she thought she was going to die. It had been very impressive to make a suit in a cave out of a box of scraps, but woman needed more in this life than just being impressive. For instance, she needed a nicely organized worktable and a Jarvis. On the list of experiences to repeat, being kidnapped was right up there with her parents’ death and the time she’d accidentally puked on the President’s shoes. 

Why couldn’t she repeat that threesome with Ryan Reynolds and the adorable little twink instead? That was great. Toni would personally appreciate repeating that life experience another dozen times. 

“You’re awake,” Roger said. “Good.”

Toni turned her head. Roger was sitting on the other cot; his metal arm had been removed, leaving him looking oddly fragile and imbalanced. His other hand and both of his feet were chained to the bed. Toni was suddenly hit with a reminder of what had happened to the last person who had said those two sentences, and she felt sick. 

Ugh. Roger had better not die. She was all out of foundations. 

“They assigned me a roommate, I see,” she said. “Nice to meet you, I’m Toni. I hope we’re going to have a fun year here at Kidnapping U.”

“Unfortunately, there’s nowhere I can get away from you,” Roger said fondly, “including prison. Tragic.”

“Not worried about us engineering escape attempts?”

Roger silently pointed to the left back corner of the room. Toni craned her neck. A camera blinked green.

These people looked more competent than her last kidnappers. Damn. No hope they’d drop her next to a cell phone. They probably wouldn’t even let her have some tools to invent with. Even if she couldn’t figure out a way to escape, it would have been nice to relieve the boredom. 

“You woke up early,” Toni said.

“Supersoldier metabolism,” Roger said. “I can’t really get drunk either.”

The horrifying thought of not being able to get drunk filled Toni with a renewed gratitude. She might be a kidnapping victim for the second fucking time in less than a year, but at the very least once she was out she could dissolve her trauma in her favorite solvent. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Toni said. “I’ve been kidnapped before and, let me tell you, it was a miserable fucking experience I had absolutely no intentions on repeating. Last time I escaped, it was by sheer luck.” She considered. “Well, sheer stupidity of the Ten Rings. So I made some preparations to make sure I don’t have to rely on that again.”

“Were those preparations,” came a cool, cultured voice from behind the back of Toni’s head, “perhaps a tracker placed in your arc reactor? Because we found that. And right now it’s floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Err,” Toni said. “Yes.” Fuck. 

“It is a pleasure to meet you in person,” said the voice. “I am Aldrich Killian, CEO of AIM.”

With a great effort, Toni pushed herself up on one arm and turned. No such luck. She tried the other arm. Nope, she couldn’t see Aldrich Killian that way either. “Can you get one of your minions to move me so I can see you?” Toni said. “Whose bright idea was it to put me where I couldn’t see the door?”

“Indeed, that very question brings me to why I am talking to you today,” Killian said. “I have come to offer you a job.”

“A job” definitely did not sound like what Toni was most interested in, which was “an ability to see if Killian looked as smug as he sounded.” “Hell of a way to recruit someone,” Toni said. “Why don’t you just call Pepper? She files all the recruiter letters in the circular cabinet.”

“Well, my primary purpose was to keep you from… mm… interfering with our research,” Killian said. “Some of our scientists were very upset to see their hard work destroyed. I prefer to keep my scientists happy. As a CEO yourself, you no doubt understand.”

Toni really didn’t. Pepper and Obie handled that stuff. Toni preferred to be one of the scientists they were trying to keep happy. It involved more shiny new tools and fewer meetings. 

“Nevertheless, I saw a certain… opportunity,” Killian said. “And I do prefer to take advantage of opportunities. I have long admired your work, Miss Stark.” 

If he really admired her work, he would call her ‘doctor’. “So I work for you or you kill me,” Toni said. 

“Oh, that’s… unsubtle,” Killian said. “Certainly the threat of death is a stick, but you might take your chance on escaping, keeping both your freedom and your life. I prefer using the carrot. You have seen our Extremis soldiers in action, I trust, in your little… escapade with Dr. Banner.” 

Oh, yeah, Bruce gets his doctorate. How many doctorates do you have to have before people start respecting them? Probably it was at least two extra for being a girl, and a drunk, and a cripple. Toni was tempted to get a PhD in quantum physics out of sheer spite. 

Realizing that Killian expected an answer, Toni said, “One of them tried to kill me.”

“I understand, Miss Stark,” Killian said, “that you have a spinal-cord injury which you sustained in Afghanistan when you were kidnapped by the Ten Rings.”

“Yeah,” Toni said, “can’t move my legs. Are you planning on getting rid of my ability to use my arms this time? Because I saw this documentary about this guy who drew things with a pen in his mouth and I bet I can come up with all kinds of, like, pen-controlled robots, and that’s not even considering how easy it would be to switch all of my tech to voice control using Jarvis--”

“Rather the opposite,” Killian said. “You’ve seen that Extremis makes soldiers superhuman. What you have not seen is that it makes everyone superhuman.”

“I did see that, actually,” Toni said. “Guy with the ALS which is gone now. Totally saw it. Like, that’s the reason that you know that I was the one who smashed up your files instead of some random person with a grudge--” 

Toni couldn’t see Killian’s face, but she could tell by his voice that he was smiling in the most douchey way possible. “I can cure you.”

Toni contemplated this proposal and then gave it the only response it deserved. “Fuck off.”

“Come now,” Killian chided. “Wouldn’t it be better if you could walk? If you could see me when I talk to you? You can’t say you’ve never thought about it.”

“I could see you when you talked to me,” Toni said, “if you weren’t a complete fucking douchebag. Have you invented a cure for douchebaggery yet? I bet it would give a lot of hope to your fellow sufferers--”

“But my point is that I can choose to remove your ability to see me. You are dependent on the kindness and goodwill of others,” Killian said.

Toni couldn’t help it. She snorted. “What I’m dependent on is having fuck-off amounts of money,” she said, “and I was dependent on that long before Afghanistan.”

“Also on ethanol,” Roger added helpfully.

“That too.”

“If you two are quite finished,” Killian said, “this is a serious deal which I am proposing. Work for me, and I will inject you with Extremis. You can walk again.”

“Uh, in case you haven’t noticed, Extremis soldiers have this little habit of exploding,” Toni said. 

“One in four so far,” Killian confirmed.

“I might be in a wheelchair,” Toni said, “but I am not dead.”

“Perhaps,” Killian said, “but can you really say your life is worth living? Trapped in a wheelchair. I wonder if you are able to control your bladder, or if that Ms. Potts of yours tends to it for you. A good personal assistant has a wide range of skills, after all. You can’t have sexual intercourse...”

“I can too,” Toni said, stung. “You’re just not creative enough.”

Killian did not seem to notice her interruption. “Can you have any dignity, living like that? Helpless, dependent on others for even your most private needs, having to see the disgust flash across people’s faces when you roll into the room. Would you really not run the risk of dying for even a chance of being able to walk again?”

“Uh,” Toni said. “Is that a trick question?”

There was a silence. Killian had apparently not prepared for that response to his script. 

“Like, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a billionaire genius philanthropist superhero who’s just started dating a darkly brooding assassin,” Toni said. Over on the other side of the room, Roger waved his hand to indicate that he was the darkly brooding assassin in question. “My life is objectively awesome.” 

“I see,” Killian said. “You think I’m able-bodied, and I just don’t understand. I’ve embraced the stigma against paraplegics. I need to be shown a bunch of videos of paraplegics climbing Mount Everest so I can learn that they can do anything an able-bodied person can do.” The contempt that crept into his voice at those words was very similar to Toni’s own.

“I don’t know what you are,” Toni said in frustration, “because I can’t see you.”

“What if I told you I myself used to be a cripple?” Killian said.

“I would say I don’t give a flying fuck,” Toni said. 

“They told me I would have to learn to live with my disabilities.” Killian’s voice lost its smug edge and became infused with a bitter passion. “They said I would have to accept them.” His voice twisted with anger on the word ‘accept’. “I refused. I was never going to allow myself to live like that. I went into biology to learn to cure my own illness. I was brilliant, but I needed funding.”

Holy shit. Toni had thought this was a movie trope but apparently villains really did monologue at you about their evil plans. It didn’t look like he was going to give her the secret to defeating him, though. Real life was not that convenient. 

“You’re lucky, you know,” Killian said. “Stark Industries can’t fire you, so they have to accommodate you. No one ever accommodated me. I could hear the enthusiasm on the phone, but it was ‘sorry, you’re just not a good fit for our organization’ as soon as I rolled in the door. I could see the pity in their eyes.”

“I had that problem,” Toni said. “Fortunately, I made the Iron Maiden suit, so now I can fly reporters to the stratosphere and then drop them. --Which would, of course, be wrong. Tempting, but wrong.”

“If only,” Killian said. He sounded wistful.

“Cheer up,” Toni said. “I bet a biology genius like you could totally come up with a bioengineered undetectable poison! --Which would, of course, still be wrong.”

“I am so reassured about your ethical sense,” Roger said.

Killian was not going to let any of Toni’s interruptions get in the way of his monologue. God. She was trying to let him subvert villain tropes here! Some people had no gratitude. “I started AIM,” he said. “Mobsters and warlords don’t care if you’re a crip, as long as you can give them the edge over their enemies. Curing myself stymied me for years, until I realized. There would be no solution except to perfect the human form itself. Two years later, I made Extremis.”

Much to her alarm, Toni found herself kind of liking the guy. There was just something about people who coped with their life problems via being smarter than anyone else and completely incapable of understanding the concept of ‘cutting your losses.’ “Can’t cure my disabilities? Well, I’m just going to have to fix all flaws in humanity!” was a clear example of Toni logic. As horrifying as it was, he reminded her of herself, and frankly the person Toni had always found most admirable was herself. 

“I was the first test subject,” Killian said. “I could have died. But I didn’t care. Anything was better than living one more day in that fucking chair.” He paused. “You have no idea how good it feels not to be tired.” His voice was full of honest happiness-- not triumph over an enemy or pompous superiority. He was baring his soul to Toni. 

It was awful. It was one thing to kidnap someone, and another thing to use them as a therapist. 

Apparently not even being a prisoner was enough to save Toni from men with emotions. 

“I’m extremely sympathetic,” Toni said, “you have no idea how sympathetic I am, but as you pointed out I am lucky and awesome so the answer is still ‘fuck off.’” Toni considered. “But, like, a nice fuck off. A ‘I know you’ve kidnapped me and you can kill me whenever you want, so I’m being a little bit diplomatic’ fuck off.”

“You can’t be diplomatic just by saying you’re being diplomatic,” Roger said. “Other steps are involved.”

“Says Silent McBrood over there,” Toni said. “Occasionally injecting in flippant comments. I hope you know that that’s supposed to be my job.”

“I’m not participating in this conversation,” Roger said, “I know I’m going to end up dead regardless, and I see no point in pleasing the guy who’s going to kill me by interacting with him.”

“Your relentless optimism is an example to us all.”

“You know,” Killian said, “this isn’t the first time we’ve met. I asked for your support of AIM back in 1999 when we were first getting started. It was at a party. You were drunk and talking to some man, but you said that when you were done with him you would meet me on the roof. You never did. I waited, god, past dawn. It was eight or nine am when I gave up.”

Toni considered this. She didn’t have any memory of it per se-- actually all of 1999 was kind of a blur, between new-millennium parties and late nights preventing the Y2K bug-- but it definitely seemed like the sort of thing that she would do. 

“I felt… awkward,” Killian said. “My disabilities had always made me an outcast, and I knew everyone there was repulsed by me. You were glamorous. I worked up the courage to talk to you about one of the most important things in my life. And you rejected me.” His voice was quiet. “I thought often about killing myself, those days, before I invented Extremis.”

“Oh god,” Toni said, “did you have a crush on me?”

“Miss Stark,” Killian said, “I assure you my interests were the most professional--”

“That’s why you’re monologuing at me!” Toni said. “It’s not a supervillain thing! You’re trying to get me to like you!”

“I was trying to establish rapport,” Killian said, “so you would act in your own best interest, which you seem extraordinarily determined--”

“Dear God,” Toni said, “I’m being kidnapped by a stalker with a crush.” She pointed to Roger. “Boyfriend. Over there. The darkly brooding assassin I was talking about. Significantly cuter than you and likes me alive, which I have always considered to be an important trait in a boyfriend.”

“How would you know he’s more attractive?” Killian said. “As you have pointed out so often, you can’t see me.”

“Oh. I can tell.”

“I literally have no idea how you survived being kidnapped the first time,” Roger said. 

“I had a translator,” Toni said.

“That explains a lot,” Roger said. 

“I was not... interested in you,” Killian said. “I just felt upset that someone I admired abandoned me on a rooftop in order to get drunk with morons, and for your information I would have been equally upset if you were a man.” He sighed. “This is useless. I can’t believe I decided to give you a second chance.”

“I’ve heard that a lot,” Toni said. “I prefer to think of it as reliability. No matter what happens, you know I’m going to be a disappointment.”

“But when I saw you were a crip like I was I couldn’t kill you,” Killian said. “Not without offering you a chance at Extremis. I fancied being crippled would have made you more considerate.” He was talking to himself, mostly, not to Toni. “I should have known better. Suffering doesn’t make you a better person. It just makes you hurt.”

Toni wondered if her treatment of Killian, and the fact that she didn’t really care about having hurt him, made her a bad person. Probably. On the other hand, he did kidnap her. Probably even Gandhi wasn’t forgiving of people who had kidnapped him. 

“Anyway,” Killian said, his voice returning to its previous smugness, “I suppose I should give you some time to think about your answer to my proposal.”

“You’ve had it several times,” Toni said. “Maybe you’re hard of hearing. Perhaps I should say it in sign language?” She did. She didn’t know if Killian could see it, or indeed if he knew sign language, but she suspected he got the gist. 

If he did get the gist, he ignored it. Toni was annoyed that he’d managed to figure out such an effective Toni-deflecting strategy after just a few minutes of acquaintance. “I will give you twenty-four hours to consider my proposal,” Killian said. “If you continue to say ‘no’, you will die. If you try to escape, you will die.” He paused. “I suggest spending less time on clever retorts.”


	14. Chapter 14

Some time later, Roger said, “You know what Extremis would do.”

“Make me explode?” Toni said. “Yes, I do know. I just went over it with Killian like fourteen times.” She looked the camera in the eye. Lens. Whatever. “And I still don’t want to blow up, Killian, so you can stop thinking whatever it is you’re thinking right fucking now.”

“Not to you,” Roger said. “To me.”

Toni was confused for a second, wondered if perhaps she had underestimated how much Roger disliked not having an arm (even with his super-cool-awesome upgraded new arm, courtesy of Stark Industries), then figured it out.

“You know,” Toni said, “for someone who is supposed to be a super-awesome secret assassin spy, you really aren’t very good at infosec.” She indicated the camera with a wave of her hand. 

“They have spies in the AWI,” Roger said, “and my… condition… isn’t exactly secret.” 

Toni was disappointed. She was already looking forward to inventing the elaborate code they would use to talk about Roger’s amnesia. Perhaps borscht would have been involved. Or swordfish. Toni felt firmly that a good code included both borscht and swordfish. 

“The fact that I have to be frozen is in my codename,” Roger said. “Winter Soldier.”

Toni blinked. She turned this over in her mind.

“God, that’s horrible,” Toni said.

“I know.”

“Who thought of it?”

“I have no idea,” Roger said, “and that’s exactly the fucking problem.”

“It really isn’t,” Toni said. “Personally, I would welcome the sweet embrace of oblivion after interacting with someone who made puns like that. Probably it would be the only thing that would save my sanity.”

“That’s not funny,” Roger said.

“Who said I was being funny?” Toni said. “I was deadly serious. Better complete amnesia than remembering any of the rest of that guy’s jokes. Eurgh.” Toni shuddered dramatically.

“Still not funny.”

“Buzzkill.” Honestly, Toni wouldn’t have worked so hard to give Roger a personality if she’d known he was going to be so lame. 

“I know talking about it now is bad infosec,” Roger said, “but I don’t care. If I hadn’t said anything about my amnesia just now, Killian would have been back in six hours trying to sell me on it anyway. Better to save him the spywork.”

“Would you take him up on it?” 

Roger’s quiet was an answer in and of itself. 

“You can’t do that, Roger,” Toni said. “It might kill you.”

“I’m going to die anyway.”

“Yes, yes,” Toni said, “everyone dies sometime, I too was a teenage goth who wore too much facepaint and listened to Sisters of Mercy, but if you’re telling me you don’t see the difference between dying now and dying in God-knows-how-many-years-you-fucking-supersoldier I’m going to call you a liar.”

“No,” Roger said, “I mean my literal life expectancy is a few more weeks.”

Toni’s eyes widened, and a pit opened inside her stomach. “Is this some side effect of the supersoldier metabolism thing?” she said. “I mean, I know you’re like in your seventies, but you’re a very healthy seventy-year-old.” Toni took a moment to eye Roger appreciatively. God, her boyfriend was hot. Definitely in the top ten percent of men she’d dated. Probably the top five. “A very, very healthy seventy-year-old.”

“I am going to be frozen,” Roger said, his anger only showing through the precise, clipped way he was pronouncing the words, “I am going to die, and then a different person named Roger is going to walk out of the cryochamber wearing my face.”

“You aren’t going to die,” Toni said. “You’re going to forget things. Big difference. I forget stuff all the time and I’m not a different person.” She reflected. “Much to Pepper’s eternal disappointment.”

“You don’t forget everything,” Roger said. “You remember Afghanistan, you remember your parents’ death, you remember the first time you looked at a car engine and suddenly there was one thing in the world that made sense--”

“Nothing like Afghanistan has happened to you--”

“That we know of,” Roger said. “Which is the point.”

“You’re still you,” Toni said. “You still like romantic comedies and Starbucks and pretentious hipster grilled cheese and the name ‘Roger.’ And you’re snarky--”

“Ah, yes,” Roger said. “Because as we all know only one person on the whole entire planet likes Starbucks. Truly, that is sufficient proof of identity. You should tell the government, they’ve been wasting all this time on photo IDs when they could have just asked who wanted an iced mocha.”

“How do you know Extremis will fix your brain anyway?” Toni challenged. “All we know about Extremis is that it makes people fast and strong, and they can shoot fireballs from their hands, and some of them explode. There is absolutely no reason to think it cures amnesia.”

“The brain is an organ,” Roger said. “Extremis brings every body part to its peak performance. I am pretty sure peak human performance in the brain does not involve having to be frozen once a month and then forgetting everything. Anyway, even if it fails, I’m not worse off”

“Unless you’re dead,” Toni said. “Because you exploded.”

“Like I said,” Roger said in a depressingly matter-of-fact voice, “I’m no worse off.”

“You don’t know it’ll bring your memories back,” Toni said. “Nothing about peak human brain function implies that you’d remember things you once forgot. They probably aren’t even in your brain anymore.”

“I don’t care about my old memories,” Roger said. “I was only born a few weeks ago. Those memories were all made by some stranger with my face. I want to start laying down new ones.” His voice was quiet. “With you.”

“That’s sweet,” Toni said, “that’s very sweet, are you hoping to make me forget that you’re fucking suicidal.”

“Not suicidal,” Roger said. “Dying. And clinging like a drowning man to driftwood to any hope of being alive. There’s a difference.”

“You’re a supersoldier,” Toni said. “I’m pretty sure they haven’t tested Extremis on a supersoldier-- it’d be a waste of money. And there’s like a dozen different kinds of supersoldier anyway, I might not know a lot of classified information but I know that much. How do you know how it’d interact with the rest of your system? You could have all kinds of bizarre and unwanted effects.” Toni thought. Her desire to keep Roger near her, safe and-- this was crucial-- alive, warred with her innate engineer’s tendency to try to solve any problem. “I suppose we could look at your documentation, it would give us an idea. When we escape we’ll have to ask Rumlow--”

Roger hesitated.

Horror dawned on Toni’s face. “Do you even still have your documentation?”

“It was really confusing for a while after the Soviet Union fell and we lost a lot of important information--”

“They lost your documentation?” On the last word, Toni’s voice rose into a wail. 

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Roger said. “I’m strong and tough and I get frozen and forget things. I’m not exactly a complicated human being here.”

Toni stared at the ceiling and prayed to Grace Hopper, goddess of bugs, that she would never have to work with a completely undocumented system who also happened to be a person. Then she thought about it and added to her prayer the word ‘again.’

“AIM’s scientists are smart,” Roger said. “They’ll figure it out. You can give them the right incentives by saying you’ll only work for them if I’m alive and not amnesiac afterward. I bet they’d still jump at the chance.” His voice went sing-song. “Because their booooss has a cruuush.”

Toni tried to think of another argument. The only thing she could come up with was ‘you wouldn’t have your neat metal arm anymore, just after I put in all this effort to make sure you had a really cool metal arm,’ but all Roger would say was that Toni could probably come up with an equally cool metal glove. Which was true. 

When all else fails, try flat assertation. “You can’t take Extremis,” Toni said.

“Why not?”

“You just can’t.”

“That’s not an argument.”

“Because I love you!” Toni said. “You might be dead to yourself but you’re not dead to me, I love you and I want to be close to you and I want to get to know you and I will seduce you a thousand times if I have to, because as long as I have to take care of you it means you’re here and alive and with me. It might make no difference to you whether you’re a corpse or an amnesiac, but it matters to me because goddammit I lost my parents and I lost Yinsen and I lost Jarvis and I don’t want someone else I care about to die.”

Whoops. Feelings. Toni hated when that happened. 

There was a long silence. 

Toni peeped over at Roger. He was staring thoughtfully at the ceiling, as if an extremely interesting theorem were written on it and he was just trying to grasp the intricacies. Toni craned her head. No theorem.

He was probably having thoughts about Ethics then. Damn ethics. 

“Are you my handler?” Roger said finally. 

“What kind of ridiculous question is that?” Toni asked.

“An important one,” Roger said. “Are you my handler?”

“Of course not,” Toni said, “where would you get that idea? I’m your fellow supersoldier, and your friend, and as of about twelve hours ago your girlfriend. If anyone’s your handler, it’s Rumlow, but I’ve gotten him to have the right idea about this damn business. No more of this nonsense where he gets to control your entire life. When you’re in battle, when he says ‘jump’ you say ‘how high’, but when you’re off the clock the only person that gets to make the decisions about you is you.”

“Then why do you get a say in what I do with my body?” Roger asked. 

Killian must have been playing some kind of bizarre game, because the room suddenly felt ten degrees colder.

“My handler does, because I am a thing,” Roger said, as if he were just figuring something important out. “A machine with human flesh. If I don’t do what he says, then I am malfunctioning. You say I’m a person and I can make my own choices. Is that true? Or are you just a handler who gives me a whole lot of discretion?”

There was a long pause.

“That’s not fair,” Toni said.

“It’s very fair,” Roger said. 

“I was trying to teach you how to be a person,” Toni said. “You can’t just turn it around on me like that.”

“From what you’ve told me,” Roger said, “you can’t teach me to be a person. I was a person the whole time. Whether or not people wanted to treat me like it”

“You’re supposed to not do what other people say,” Toni said. “Like Rumlow. You’re not supposed to not do what I say. That is totally not how I intended this to work!”

“So you thought that if I made decisions of my own free will,” Roger said, “by some coincidence, it would turn out that every one of those decisions was one you approved of?”

“Yes!”

It was really astonishing the amount of contempt Roger could get into a single grunt. 

“I could say ‘no,’” Toni said. “You don’t have anything to offer AIM, I don’t think. You’re a supersoldier, but they can mass-produce people like you now. I doubt Killian much cares whether you live or die.”

“That’s true,” Roger said.

“The only way you can get Extremis,” Toni said, “is if I decide to work for them.”

Roger inclined his head, acknowledging the truth of Toni’s remark.

“I don’t have to say yes,” Toni said. “It’s not denying your agency for me to set my own boundaries. Rhodey and I went to a couples’ therapist once and she totally told me that.” Toni didn’t really believe in therapists-- they always wanted her to stop drinking and stop fucking and talk about her emotions, and they were always so goddamned sympathetic about her dad-- but the devil could quote scripture to her purpose. 

“That is true,” Roger said. 

“I mean, I probably do have ethical objections,” Toni said, growing more enthusiastic about this new line of attack. “I just got done making weapons for one dubiously evil organization, I have no interest in making weapons for a whole bunch of dubiously evil organizations.”

“Did you just equate the U.S. government and the Mafia?” Roger said.

“I’m sure there’s a difference,” Toni said, “but I doubt it matters much to the children they murder.”

“You can absolutely refuse to work for AIM,” Roger said. “I can’t stop you. As you point out, I have the right to make my own choices, and you have the right to make yours. It’s all about being a person. If you’re not my handler, then equally I’m not yours.” Toni smiled, pleased at this concession. She would now have an alive Roger all to herself, no dead children, and none of those silly ethical worries which kept messing with her fun. “If you’re sure that your objection is entirely about dead children, and not a selfish desire to keep me close to you even at the cost of my happiness, then I can’t say anything to criticize you.” 

Toni’s smile dropped. She stared at the ceiling. It was gray, unyielding stone. If her legs worked, she would be able to stand up and brush her fingers against it. She wondered if it would feel cool to the touch.

“This is really unfair,” she said quietly. 

“I know,” Roger said. 

Toni went back to staring at the ceiling. 

She felt like some cosmic television had decided to play reruns of the worst moments of Toni’s life. First, it was Afghanistan, and now it was Rhodey. Now all she needed was for a parental figure to die and she’d be three for three. 

Toni briefly distracted herself by wondering whether number four would be getting caught blowing three princes at the Nobel award ceremony, puking on the president’s shoes, or the first time she caught a glimpse of a tabloid with an unflattering photo of her exiting a club and the headline TOTAL SURPRISE: ANTOINETTE STARK STILL AN ABSOLUTE MESS. 

Toni was careless. She didn’t intend to do bad things; she just didn’t think things through, and bad things happened, and maybe she would have noticed that they would happen if morality had the grace to be as interesting as engineering. But at least she didn’t mean to hurt people. It had taken a hundred deaths to get her to notice that her bombs were killing people, but when she knew she’d stopped making them. She told Roger he was a person, because she wasn’t going to talk to someone and treat him like he was a mindless machine. (She didn’t even treat her mindless machines like they were mindless machines.)

It hadn’t occurred to her what Roger must feel like about being mind-wiped, because, well, of course it didn’t. That was just the person Toni was. But if he wanted Extremis, she was going to get him Extremis.

Not through killing children, though. She’d done that once. Never again.

Perhaps if they escaped…? But Killian was not as sloppy as Reza. Roger was armless, but even armless he was dangerous; she had no doubt he could escape if he left her behind. He could maybe even get Extremis; he had the reckless courage of someone who had everything to live for. But Toni was helpless. She briefly entertained the image of her piggyback-riding on him as he dodged bullets… but no. She’d slow him down. He’d get captured. They’d lock him up more tightly, more sharply aware of exactly what a cornered supersoldier could do. They had one chance.

He could abandon her. If one of them were alive, it was better than neither of them being alive. Perhaps Roger could organize a rescue party. But Toni knew herself, knew her breaking point, as much as she knew any well-tested metal. If she had hope, she could survive. But if it was a choice between morality and survival, AIM’s clients would suddenly have a lot more ability to make dead children.

Those were her specs, then. No dead children. Toni and Roger, both free. No more than one escape attempt. And a vial of Extremis and-- why not get optimistic-- a willing AIM scientist who could explain how the damn thing worked. It was bad enough to work with one undocumented system, there was no need to combine two.

It was an impossible task. But Toni had faced down impossible tasks before. Admittedly, they were mostly engineering impossible tasks, but if Toni knew one thing in this life it was that everything-- everything-- could be viewed as a form of engineering.

All you had to do was solve the problem that was in front of you.

Toni wished she had a computer to play with. Nothing like a bit of repetitive coding to distract your hands while your mind worked. Instead she had to watch the ceiling, feel Roger’s eyes on her from across the room and Killian’s eyes on her through the camera, tap her fingers against her legs that didn’t feel and would never feel again.

Hell, if you really wanted to make it impossible, she’d add in the constraint that it would have to defeat AIM once and for all, keep them from ever selling arms to anyone ever again--

And then an idea dawned on Toni.

“I know how we’re going to get out of here,” she said. “And you’re going to get your Extremis.”

“What?” Roger said. “You’re okay with it? Just like that?”

“As rare as it is, I am occasionally wrong about something,” Toni said. “Take a picture. Put it in the scrapbook. It isn’t going to happen often.”

“What are you going to do?”

Toni was excited. If she could stand up, she would be pacing. As it was, she satisfied herself with gesturing in a dramatic fashion. “I totally thought Killian’s villain monologue wouldn’t give me the secret to defeating him,” Toni said, “but it did.”

“I thought he was mostly going on about his crush for you,” Roger said. “Are you going to seduce him to distract him while I escape?”

“You watch too many movies,” Toni said dismissively.

“Says the person who just said Killian’s villain monologue gave her the secret to defeating him.”

“I watch exactly the right number of movies,” Toni said. 

“So what did you figure out?” Roger said. “If you take every third word it tells you a secret plan about how to escape?”

Toni grinned. “We’re going to have to have a meeting.”


	15. Chapter 15

“I understand we’re supposed to have PowerPoints at this sort of affair,” Toni said, “but unfortunately I can’t read, so you will just have to bear with me.”

She beamed beatifically at her audience, which consisted solely of a bemused-looking Aldrich Killian. He was exactly as smarmy-looking as Toni had expected. What she hadn’t expected was his habit of snapping his fingers to summon a small flame, then fiddling with it as if it were a pen. She half-thought he was going to put the fire in his mouth and start absent-mindedly chewing.

“You said you have a counteroffer,” Aldrich Killian said.

“I do,” Toni said. “My counteroffer is that instead of me working for you, you work for me. You agree to never make a weapon again. I’ll give you a generous salary from Stark Industries. You can run your own division with as many ex-AIM scientists as you like, and you’ll have nearly complete autonomy. You’ll repurpose whatever you can of your old inventions for the civilian market, and invent as many new things as you want. Our lawyers will sort out the rights issues. When you have free time, you’ll join Roger, Bruce and I as members of the Ultimates Initiative, saving the world from people like the person you used to be. And as thanks for me offering you this wonderful opportunity, you’ll give Roger a dose of Extremis.”

“That…” Aldrich Killian said, “is not the counteroffer I was hoping for.”

Toni shrugged.

“In fact,” Killian said, twiddling the fire between his fingers, “I don’t much see how I benefit from it at all. It’s the exact thing I’m doing already, except with less freedom and less money and I have to go out supersoldiering despite being not allowed to kill people.”

“You don’t have to be a supersoldier if you don’t want to,” Toni said, “although if you made another supersoldier that would be helpful--”

“Unfortunately, we’re all out,” Killian said. “Thanks partially to the instability of Extremis, partially to your armless friend, and partially to you destroying all our records.” He looked sour. “How did you know that destroying our tax records would bring AIM to a halt?”

Toni grimaced. “Luck?”

Killian frowned and crossed his arms. “I will hear your pitch,” he said. “You gave me that courtesy and I will at least give it to you. And I”-- he said, his voice getting a little snide--”won’t be sarcastic the whole time, unlike some people.”

Toni almost reconsidered her plan. If this succeeded, she’d have to be on the same team as the guy. She’d be his boss! She would have to talk to him, probably on multiple occasions! But she remembered the importance of getting Roger his Extremis, and pressed on.

Toni hoped Roger realized exactly how much she loved him.

“How much do you know about my little trip to Afghanistan?” Toni said.

“I know enough,” Killian said. “You got shot in the back, it crippled you, and then, like a good little inspiration-porn disabled person, that made you think about where your life is going and what it all means and your legacy, and you wound up not making any weapons except for the ones you use to harass my scientists.”

“Not actually what happened,” Toni said. “Do you know Dr. Yinsen?”

“The robosurgeon?” Killian said. “I’m familiar with his work. He died in Afghanistan years ago.”

“Died in Afghanistan, yes,” Toni said. “Years ago, no.” 

As she spoke, Toni felt like she could feel Yinsen’s presence around her. For once in her miserable fuckup of a life, she was doing something that he was proud of. (That meant that Yinsen’s ghost had about infinity more times in which he was proud of Toni than Howard’s ghost had had.)

“Yinsen had been taken prisoner by the Ten Rings,” Toni said. A flash of recognition passed through Killian’s face, and he flinched. He sold weapons to them. Good. The anecdote would be stronger. “They used him as their pet doctor, threatening his family unless he took care of them. He helped me escape--”

 

“And he died in the escape attempt?” Killian asked.

“No,” Toni said. “Before I managed to escape, the village that Yinsen and his family were in was bombed. Hundreds of people died. Not one of them was a terrorist. Yinsen and his family died a horrible, painful death.” There was a lump in her throat. “The missiles were made by Stark Industries. My design.”

“Oh,” Killian said. His face was quite still. The fire danced between his fingers. 

“So I stopped making weapons,” Toni said, “and I want you to stop making weapons too.”

“Some of us,” Killian said, a twinge of personal bitterness creeping into his voice, “are not out-of-touch trust fund babies who think they can do whatever they want without anyone else ever really getting hurt, because after all they’re the only people with real feelings. I am not a moron. I know people die because of my weaponry.”

“So did I,” Toni said. “If someone said ‘hey, Toni, do you know your missiles are used to kill people?’ I’d say ‘of course I do, what are you, an idiot?’ But I didn’t really know. Not until I experienced it.”

“I don’t care what you felt,” Killian said, the fire running up to his shoulder and back down. “I help evil people kill people for money. That’s my job. Why do you think you can get me to stop by pointing out that my job is my job? I know! I work it!”

“You’re trying to act like you don’t care,” Toni said, “but you do.”

“You don’t know anything about me.” Killian was tense, on the defensive. Toni could work with this. 

“I know you gave a guy with ALS Extremis,” Toni said.

Killian waved a hand dismissively, but his eyes were tight. “Safety testing,” he said. “No sense wasting a trained soldier on something that might make people die horribly instead of becoming superhuman.”

“Except you did that after you had half-a-dozen supersoldiers with Extremis,” Toni said, “and your safety testing can’t be that good if people keep exploding.”

“A new refinement of the formula,” Killian said, his voice calm even as the fire stilled in his hands, “one that might be more stable, or might make him die painfully while begging for his mother. The mouse models went either way. We get some use out of our supersoldiers before they explode-- and not all of them do. We would get no such use out of a trained soldier dying a predictable horrible death.” 

“You saved me,” Toni said.

“You’re useful,” Killian said in such a condescending voice that Toni forgot all her good intentions about saving Killian and getting the Extremis and instead seethed with anger. “For all your faults, you’re a great weapons designer. I would be remiss to not at least attempt to hire you. After all”-- Killian smiled like he was a shark--”I can always kill you later.”

Killian had lost his defensiveness now that the conversation had moved onto safer ground. He was rehearsing well-worn arguments that he’d probably said to himself as much as to anyone else. Toni took a note and tried a different tack. 

“You’re so fucked up,” Toni said. “You’re even more fucked up than I am, which a string of therapists with very long lists of letters after their names will tell you is impressive. Like, I at least pretend I’m a good person? But you have all these stories you tell yourself because you don’t want to admit that there is a shred of good inside your desiccated husk of a soul. You have empathy and altruism and you repress them and pretend to yourself that you’re cold and ruthless. But you know what? You used to be a cripple. You didn’t like being a cripple, and when you see people being cripples, it makes you remember what happened to you and you want to help them. And no matter how hard you pretend to yourself that that isn’t true, it’s still going to be the case.”

It was only a second. A brief crinkling of Aldrich Killian’s eyes, a brief twitch of the dancing flame, and then he went back to being Smug, King of Smuglandia and the First Smugs, Lord of the Seven Smugnesses, Protector of the Smug Realms, The First of His Name. But Toni saw it and she thought: I’m right, I’m goddamn right, I was just cold reading him because I don’t know shit about his psychology but I was fucking right.

She had to push her advantage. “I’m not a big fan of denial,” Toni said. “It doesn’t solve problems. No matter how hard you pretend the whiskey bottle is full, it’s still empty, and no matter how hard you pretend your program works, it still has bugs. If you stop denying reality, you can face up to what’s actually there, and maybe you can fix it.”

“This is absurd,” Killian said. “You don’t know what I’m like better than I do--”

Toni could see him retreating back onto his safe, comfortable territory-- where no one understood him and he was all alone. That wouldn’t do. She had to keep him off balance. 

“I’m sorry,” Toni said. “I’m sorry I stood you up, and I’m sorry I called you a stalker with a crush for still being upset about it. It’s okay to be upset about it. I was a jerk. Am a jerk, but I’m working on it. It was wrong, and I shouldn’t have done it.”

“You’re not really,” Killian said, his voice full of a surprising honesty. “People like you love mocking people like me.”

“I am,” Toni said, and to her surprise it was true.

“I don’t care,” Killian said. “Do you think I’m pathetic enough to still be upset about some damn party years ago? I’m not. I have a very successful business, I’m richer than Creusus, and I’m the one who kidnapped you so maybe you should think a bit before you keep running your mouth and acting like you know things you don’t--”

Looking at Killian’s face, he seemed to really believe it, and to have not even noticed that he had been making a completely different argument not ten seconds earlier. Ugh. People who deceived themselves were so annoying. Toni was glad that she never deceived herself.

“That’s okay,” Toni said. “I’m still sorry. Even if you don’t care, it was still wrong.”

“Lecturing me about ethics,” Killian said. The flame flared. “The fuck do you know about ethics?”

Cursing. For a guy like Killian, who prided himself on his coolness and composure, that was a sign that he was really angry. And as long as he was angry, she would be able to get through to him. 

“I don’t know shit about ethics,” Toni said. “Which is why I’m the one saying this. A bad person pretending to be a good one, talking to a good person pretending to be a bad one.” 

“How dare you say you can make me better,” Killian said, looking at the fire between his hands, talking to himself more than to Toni, “that Roger you’re supposedly dating killed my people--”

Not denying that he wanted to be a better person. Ha. She was winning. 

“Yes,” Toni said. “Look, I’m working on it, Project Don’t Kill People is a long-term project, I’ve gotten Roger on board now but he wasn’t on board then. Besides, they were literally trying to kill him in order to kidnap Bruce in order to mass-produce Hulks to kill millions of people, if any murders are justified those are.” Toni wondered when she’d started sounding like Rumlow.

“The people I sell weapons to are also using them to kill people who are trying to kill them,” Killian said. “By your same argument, there’s nothing wrong with it. I mean, hell, maybe it’s good. Maybe I’ll just help the violent people kill each other faster and we’ll all have some peace.”

“They use them on each other. And on people they want to threaten. And on children.” Toni paused, glanced at the desk, looked nonchalant, and counted in her mind. One, two, three. Off-handedly, as if it were something she’d just thought of, she said, “You make cripples, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” Killian said, the fire licking at his hand. “It’s part of the whole weapons manufacturing business. Just because you played around with machines like a child with a toy doesn’t mean--”

“I’m not sure you do,” Toni said. “Every time you sell one of your weapons, you make a dozen people or a hundred who had to feel the same pain you felt, live the life you thought was not worth living. Most of them innocent. Some of them children.” 

Killian was about to say something but Toni pressed onward.

“And you can say you don’t care, but frankly? I don’t believe you,” Toni said. “Ask yourself-- does anyone, even the most violent asshole you fought, deserve to suffer the way you suffered?”

Killian looked struck.

“Someday, you’re going to get it,” Toni said. “And on that day, I hope you’re going to be able to make amends. I hope”-- her breath hitched, and she realized that she was talking to herself of a few months ago as much or more as she was talking to Killian-- “I hope there aren’t going to be so many people dead that you don’t have a chance of wiping the slate clean. Thousands upon thousands of people dead at your hands, as sure as if you’d pulled the trigger yourself, and there’s nothing you can do to make it so you’ve saved more than you’ve killed, all you can do is reduce the gap, even a little bit, but you won’t ever be able to fix it, not if you had a hundred more years to live, and you don’t have that many…” Toni’s mouth was a tight line. “It’s a lot harder to save people wholesale than to kill them.”

Killian was quiet. Good. Maybe she was getting through the layers of bluster and smugness and denial to the tiny, withered heart that she knew lay somewhere in there. She knew there was good inside him. She just had to find it.

“You treat one case of ALS here, fail to shoot one Stark there,” Toni said, “but it doesn’t really add up. Not when you’re manufacturing cripples wholesale.”

Killian did not speak. His fire went out. His face had lost its smugness, and she saw that when he wasn’t being smug he was any of a dozen kids she’d known when she was at MIT-- too smart for their own good, insecurity peeking out of the edges of the arrogance they wrapped it up in, and painfully lonely. 

She felt ashamed of what she had said to him before. Part of Toni’s brain was going “uh, but he kidnapped me, and here I am trying to convince him to stop making life decisions that are going to bite him in the ass even though, as I just pointed out, he kidnapped me and thus I owe him absolutely nothing, so I’m doing pretty well on the whole morality front.” But that part was quiet, and she ignored it. She had hurt him, and that was bad; he had hurt many more people, and that was worse; and if she said the right things, he would stop, and then maybe something in this whole fucked-up mess would be okay.

“Someday, you’re going to have your Afghanistan,” Toni said. “You’re going to kill your Yinsen. The people you kill will have faces, and names, and a desire for you to fix their cell phones. And on that day you’re going to wish that you could send a message back to the past and say ‘stop lying to yourself, you’re not evil, and you don’t want to be.’’” Toni spread her hands wide. “Consider me that messenger. You have a chance now to keep that future from happening. Are you going to take it?”

The silence stretched out long. Toni knew to use this trick because Pepper always used it on her. When you want someone to admit an uncomfortable truth, you just sit there quietly until continuing the awkward silence is more awkward than admitting whatever it is you want them to admit.

Killian’s face was implacable. He didn’t even have a flame to fiddle with between his hands. Only the slightest twinge in one of his eyes gave any idea what he was thinking. Toni found herself getting uncomfortable in the silence-- after all, there was a reason the trick always worked on her-- and distracted herself by tripling numbers in her head. 

And just when Toni was about to wonder whether she’d gotten everything wrong and completely misread Killian in every way and now she was going to be fed to sharks or used as test material for one of AIM’s more exciting weapons, he said, in a voice so soft Toni could barely hear it, “okay.”

It was at that moment that Rumlow chose to burst in, a gun in each hand, biceps flexing in a way Toni definitely appreciated. 

“On the floor! Hands where I can see them!” he shouted. “This is a rescue mission!”

“You’re a bit late,” Toni commented. “I had just managed to get myself unkidnapped. Let’s give a warm welcome to the newest member of the Ultimates.” 

Killian, who had at least a vestigial flare for the dramatic, snapped his fingers and summoned a small, dancing flame. It lit up his face like he was a child putting a flashlight to his chin while telling a scary story around a campfire. 

Rumlow did not know what to say. Since that didn’t happen very often, Toni appreciated it fully. “You what?”

“I recruited him,” Toni said. “Talked to him about the error of his ways and the harm he’s causing others and the importance of not killing people”-- that last she said somewhat pointedly to Rumlow--”and now he’s working for me, making things that will almost certainly not be weapons, and also for you, shooting fireballs at things that would improve the world by being on fire, but notably not people, because he is neither going to kill or cripple people.”

Rumlow shook his head, impressed. He holstered his guns, and stuck out his hand for Killian to shake. “Welcome to the team.”


	16. Chapter 16

The first thing Toni did when she went home was throw a party.

It was, Toni thought, a fucking awesome party, particularly given how short-notice it was. The booze was flowing, the drugs were flowing, the boys were handsome (and if they weren’t, there were more than enough intoxicants to make them so), the paparazzi were safely far away, and Toni was planning to get fucked up out of her mind. 

Partially, Toni felt, if she was going to keep getting kidnapped she might as well start some kidnapping-related traditions, and getting wasted was as good a kidnapping-related tradition as any other. In fact, it was a rare occasion that Toni Stark felt could not be handled by getting wasted. 

Throwing a party was, if you thought about it, a good thing to do. It would be the first party Roger had ever been to, and Toni’s plan was to make it amazing. Okay, that was mostly because she was hoping he’d find a drug that actually worked on a super-soldier metabolism and have a really good partying experience and become just as likely to throw parties as she was, in order to stave off the complaints Rhodey had made about her “alcoholism” and her “poor coping mechanisms” and her “need for therapy.” So her motivations weren’t good, actually. In fact, they were kind of mean and selfish. Oh well. Toni had just redeemed Aldrich Killian and that was enough goodness for one day.

She’d mortally offended Aldrich Killian and kind of accidentally led to the founding of AIM when she’d ignored him at a party, and that she really did have to make up for. Now she was going to show that smug asshole the time of his fucking life. 

Besides, she’d just been kidnapped. Toni deserved this. 

Roger was having a very intense discussion with three people at the party that Toni didn’t recognize. The topic appeared to be the best strategies for disemboweling people. Their eyes were wide with horror. Toni considered rescuing them and started to roll over.

“Ow!” someone said loudly.

She’d thought that wheelchairs would be convenient for being drunk-- it was a chair! That moved!-- but they appeared to have their own problems. Toni waved vaguely in the direction of the person she’d ran over, and then wondered why she’d been moving. It didn’t seem that important. She grabbed another shot of whiskey. 

“There’s something important I have to tell you,” Pepper said.

Toni stared up at Pepper blearily. There were three Peppers, and then four; then they eventually resolved into two Peppers which, while twice the number of Peppers that normally existed or that Toni felt like she should have to handle at any point, was probably the best that was going to happen. “What’s up?” she slurred.

“Something very important has happened,” Pepper said, “and I need to talk to you about it right now.”

Across the room, Killian was getting a lap dance from three strippers at once. Toni considered hollering her approval at him, then thought better of it. She was not sure her muscle coordination was up to the task of hollering. 

“It can wait,” Toni said. “I’m busy.” She made a broad, loose hand gesture that was meant to convey the totally awesome party Toni was currently involved in, the nights she’d never remember with people she’d also never remember, and how generally unwelcome Pepper’s buzzkill nature was on such occasions. 

“It really, really can’t wait,” Pepper said. “If you get out of here now you might be sober-- I don’t know when but sooner than you will if you don’t stop now, and I really need you, something bad is happening with Stark Industries and I need you to fix--” Pepper’s words started blending with each other until they didn’t make much sense anymore, this sort of up-and-down wave of sound that meshed weirdly with the music and the talking and the sounds of fucking from the bathroom. 

Toni wanted to suck a cock. She thought for a moment that it might be very important that she suck some particular cock, like, a cock belonging to a specific individual. But Toni couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to limit her with regards to the number of cocks she’d sucked. Cocks were fun! She also thought that she’d had some particular reason not to want to suck cocks… because her legs didn’t work? But that was silly. Legs weren’t involved in blowjobs. And she’d given plenty of blowjobs while she was so wasted that she couldn’t walk, so she wasn’t sure why walking around would be any different. 

Toni noticed that Pepper was still in front of her and her mouth was moving. Pepper was so funny! She looked so angry. Toni laughed. 

“Seriously, the board is meeting--”

“Why would the board be meeting?” Toni asked. “It’s the middle of the night.”

Pepper pointed to the window. The sun was streaming in. “Oh.” Toni was impressed with herself. Usually she was unconscious at 8 am, and being this functional at 8 am ought to give her some kind of functional human points, even if the only reason she was awake at this hour was because she’d never bothered to go to bed. Probably Toni would go for a jog, if she weren’t in a wheelchair, and also high. 

Toni contemplated whether, if you were high, you would go for a fly instead of a walk. She should probably write that down. That was classic Toni Stark humor, right there. 

Was Pepper still talking? Ugh. Some people did not know how to have a good time. 

“I can’t deal with you!” Pepper shouted, dramatically threw down a couple of folders, and stormed off. A few moments later, she slunk back in, grabbed the folders, and left.

Toni observed that there was a shot of whiskey in her hand. She didn’t quite remember where the whiskey had come from, but it was probably a blessing from the whiskey gods, and it would be very disrespectful to waste it.

\--

Toni woke up in a bed. She was pretty sure she hadn’t collapsed in a bed, but she guessed that was the advantage of having a super-strong assassin boyfriend. Said boyfriend helped her transfer to her chair (she had to invent a better method of doing that one of those days), fetched her some strong black coffee and painkillers, and didn’t laugh not even a little bit when Toni declared her intentions to go to AA and never touch a sip of the demon liquor again. Toni felt nearly human when Pepper walked in. 

Toni blinked as memories of what had happened last… morning?... trickled in. “Oh shit,” she said. “What happened? Why didn’t you wake me?”

“No use,” Pepper said. “By the time you’d passed out, it was done.”

“What was done?” Toni asked.

Pepper bit her lip, trying to figure out a way to say it gracefully, and then realizing that there was nothing for it but blunt honesty. “The board replaced you as CEO.”

“They can’t do that,” Toni said. “It’s my company. There’s my name on it.”

“Actually, they can,” Pepper said. “It’s publicly traded. You were installed as a CEO after your father’s death, out of respect for his last wishes, and the board was happy to keep you as CEO as long as the profits were rising.” The ‘and Obadiah and I were doing all the actual work of being a CEO’ was implicit.

“The profits are fine!” Toni said.

“Actually, they’re not,” Pepper said. “Stark Industries has been in the red every quarter since you got back from Afghanistan.” 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Toni asked.

“I did,” Pepper said. “Several times. You said ‘you can handle it, Pep’ or ‘I’m busy’ or just grunted.” 

Toni felt like she was teetering on the edge of a pit and one wrongly-placed foot would send her hurtling headfirst into perdition. “How can they do this?” 

“I don’t blame them,” Pepper said. “After a change like your declaration that Stark Industries is no longer making weapons, a company needs a strong leader with a vision to guide it to what it will be next.” Pepper sighed. “You don’t even go to meetings.”

Toni wanted to say something like “meetings are boring,” then thought better of it. If meetings weren’t boring, she wouldn’t be in this situation. 

Pepper looked like she was about to cry. “I’m sorry, I did the best I could,” she said. 

“Oh, don’t cry, Pep,” Toni said, “you know I’m absolutely awful at emotions, I-- you did the best you can. I know you did. No one could be a better personal assistant than you.” Toni sighed. “It’s all my fault.”

Pepper had a facial expression that looked like she didn’t precisely want to agree, but intellectual honesty was quite demanding. 

“Who’s the bastard who replaced me as CEO?” Toni asked. 

“Obadiah Stane,” Pepper said. 

Toni blinked. “That fucker.”

Obie had been more of a father to her than her real father. Howard had always been busy with work, but Obie had never failed to take time out to listen to her ramble about electromagnetism or help her escape from her mother when she was trying to brush her hair. And when she’d gotten older, Toni had relied on Obie for everything. He never judged, never criticized. He’d taught her how to be a CEO, and when she decided she didn’t much like it he’d taken on far more than his fair share as second-in-command. He’d always been willing to help when she needed to contact some particular physicist at CERN, or when she noticed a tiny flaw in a weapon about to be manufactured and delayed its sale for six months while she figured it out. When Rhodey and she had been going through their hard times, he’d listened and never taken sides. She thought she’d always have him at her shoulder, as steady and reliable as the laws of physics themselves. 

And now… he’d taken away Stark Industries from her. Her father’s legacy. The one thing she had to prove herself his equal. Not just some drunken, crippled slut who made him roll over in his grave, but a genius entirely the equal of her father. And Obie had taken that away. 

Had the board offered it to him, or had he politicked to get it? Had they had to convince him? She hoped they had. All the memories made her sick to her stomach. 

Now that she’d thought about it, it had been a long time since Obie had talked to her… he hadn’t talked to her more than in passing since the press conference. Had he been distancing himself? Preparing for this moment? 

Perhaps he didn’t want to feel guilty. Toni could relate to that. 

“There’s one more piece of bad news,” Pepper said.

“Lay it on me,” Toni said.

“They’re making weapons again.”

Toni blinked, and the face of Yinsen appeared before her eyes. He was frowning. Thousands upon thousands of people dead, because it was boring to go to meetings…

“They can’t do that,” Toni said. “I’m the only asset they’ve got. The rest of the Stark Industries’s engineers couldn’t build a Lego Spaceship. With the instructions,” she added viciously. 

“Remember when I asked you about patenting your inventions,” Pepper said, “and you said ‘that’s boring, Pepper’ and told Obadiah to do whatever he thought best?”

“...yes?” Toni said.

“The patents to every single thing you’ve invented other than the suit,” Pepper said, “legally belong to Stark Industries. So yes. They can.”

Toni felt sick. She was pretty sure it wasn’t the hangover. 

The patents weren’t in her name. 

She had trusted Obie utterly. Obie hadn’t wanted something like this to happen-- no, not to his pet genius, who was so lazy and so cooperative and who let him do whatever he wanted. Not having a title was a small price to pay for absolute power over one of the biggest corporations in the world. But he had planned for this, yes he had. He had planned so that when the goose that laid the golden weapons stopped wanting to lay quite so much, he would be able to take over and minimize his losses.

Had he ever been kind to her? Even back in the early days, when he had listened to her talk about the new generator she’d built, had he ever really cared about her, or had he just known that he was talking to the future heir of Stark Industries?

Toni had been lazy, and Toni had been trusting, and people were going to die. 

“I am going to kill Ob-- Mr. Stane,” Toni said. She was never going to dignify him with that nickname again. 

\--

Hot tears dripped from Toni’s eyes. She wanted to curl up in a ball, but given that she was a fucking cripple, she couldn’t. Which was just the shit cherry on top of this feces sundae, wasn’t it. For the first time, taking Extremis didn’t seem so bad. If she exploded, the world wouldn’t lose much. 

She wondered, absently, if she would ever be able to count the number dead at her hands. The number who fell to Stark Industries bombs because she had been lazy, and easily distracted, and meetings were boring, not nearly as fun as being a giant robot and punching things--

A warm hand landed on her shoulder. She looked up. Rumlow.

“This is what I’ve come to?” she said. “I’m getting comforted by my handler?”

“Killian and Roger are busy making him a supersoldier twice over,” Rumlow said, sitting on a worktable beside her, “Pepper is trying to salvage what she can of the mess you’ve made, and I can’t really imagine you want to see Mr. Stane right now. So, process of elimination, you’ve got me.” 

“I have been providing comfort to Dr. Stark,” Jarvis said in his dignified British voice. A hologram of a kitten chasing its own tail appeared on one of the boards.

“Thanks, Jarvis,” Rumlow said, “but I think Toni’s going to need someone a little more physically embodied.”

And he hugged her, and Toni realized she’d been mistaken about what things a person could do if composed of two hundred and fifty pounds of pure muscle. In addition to lifting heavy things and breaking people’s limbs, it turned out that that gave you a chest that was great to sniffle upon. It was solid and strong and warm, and his arms enfolded her. Rumlow, some deep evolutionary part of Toni’s brain felt, could protect her from anything.

“So,” Rumlow said, sitting across from her, “do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Toni said, wiping snot on her sleeve.

“As you said, I’m your handler,” Rumlow said. “That wasn’t a request. It was an order.”

Toni glared, but complied. “I fucked up,” she said. “Again. I was lazy and I didn’t like thinking about things that were boring, and Yinsen died. And I came back from Afghanistan and I thought that I wasn’t going to be lazy anymore and I was going to think about important things even if they were boring, but I didn’t. And more people are going to die, and it’s all my fault.”

“Surely the US government bears some of the blame,” Rumlow said. “And Obadiah. And the soldiers who are actually using the weapons. And the people who manufacture them. And the AWI, for not being able to make the world perfect yet.”

“If I hadn’t fucked up,” Toni said, “none of them would have been able to hurt people.” She considered. “Okay, the suboptimality of the universe would still have been able to kill people.”

Rumlow grinned. “So really you should be yelling at me,” he said. 

“But that’s completely unreasonable,” Toni said. “You can’t expect people to do something that’s completely out of their control. It takes time to literally fix the entire world.”

“But we make mistakes,” Rumlow said. “The world could have been perfected by now, if we hadn’t made so many errors, if we’d known then as much as we know now, or will know in the future. I’ve seen the calculations, it’s true.”

“That’s still completely unreasonable,” Toni said. “You’re people. People make mistakes. Of course, you should try to never err, but no one has ever actually managed to do it. There’s no shame in it taking a lot of time and effort to become literally perfect.”

Rumlow lifted his eyebrows. Toni replayed the last few sentences she’d said. Goddammit.

“Around the AWI,” Rumlow said, “there’s a slogan we like to use. ‘Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.’ It’s a tradition that we say it, well, when we die.”

The sentence sounded oddly familiar to Toni, but she shook it off. It was probably Shakespeare. Ever since that one terrible literature class Toni had felt that about half of what any person said at any given point was actually a quote from Shakespeare. (Two-thirds, if you were a graduation speaker.)

“What that saying means to me,” Rumlow said, “is that the AWI is not going to lose, not in the long run. We can lose battles, but we’re not going to lose the war. If we fail, we’re going to regroup, we’re going to learn from our mistakes, we’re going to become better, and next time we fail we will fail in a different way.” His voice was quiet, as if speaking something very meaningful to him. “And someday the world is going to be safe. Someday, life will not be fragile. Someday, no more children will go hungry, or get cancer and waste away and die, or senselessly get hit by a car. Someday, people will only face challenges they can defeat, not the ones Nature sets, the impossible tasks with death the penalty. We do an impossible task, but it will be the last impossible task. Someday, we are going to win.”

Toni smiled through her tears.

Toni could look at something that wasn’t working right and see ways to optimize it, to make it more efficient, to repair whatever had gone wrong. And whenever something was broken it itched, it fussed at the back of her mind until she made it right. And, God, Pepper was going to have to learn now that if you wanted Toni to continue to invent more things (more weapons) Toni’s apartment and workshop had to be the first priority for-- not Stark Industries, not anymore, never again-- maintenance. 

Guilt was that sort of itch. But instead of being directed at faucets or bombs, it was directed at herself. 

She was broken.

But she had never, not once, found anything that she couldn’t fix. 

Toni straightened her shoulders. “I have work to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Toni Stark will return in We Bring Good Things To Life. Look for it in October.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: use of the words "retard" and "cripple". Deaths of many unnamed characters and one secondary character in a drone strike. Deaths of some unnamed characters in a Hulk battle. Canon-typical depictions of the Winter Soldier's treatment. Brief jokes about the Holocaust and rape.


End file.
